Super-resolution photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging with sparse arrays

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that model-based sparse array reconstruction can achieve super-resolution in photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging with significantly fewer elements than traditional methods, validated through experiments and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a super-resolution imaging approach using sparse arrays and model-based reconstruction, reducing the number of elements needed for high-resolution PA and US imaging.

Findings

Super-resolution images obtained with only 8 elements out of 128 in a linear array.

Reconstruction quality depends on the signal-to-noise ratio.

Method applicable to various transducer geometries, including 3D imaging.

Abstract

It has previously been demonstrated that model-based reconstruction methods relying on a priori knowledge of the imaging point spread function (PSF) coupled to sparsity priors on the object to image can provide super-resolution in photoacoustic (PA) or in ultrasound (US) imaging. Here, we experimentally show that such reconstruction also leads to super-resolution in both PA and US imaging with arrays having much less elements than used conventionally (sparse arrays). As a proof of concept, we obtained super-resolution PA and US cross-sectional images of microfluidic channels with only 8 elements of a 128-elements linear array using a reconstruction approach based on a linear propagation forward model and assuming sparsity of the imaged structure. Although the microchannels appear indistinguishable in the conventional delay-and-sum images obtained with all the 128 transducer elements, the applied sparsity-constrained model-based reconstruction provides super-resolution with down to only 8 elements. We also report simulation results showing that the minimal number of transducer elements required to obtain a correct reconstruction is fundamentally limited by the signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method can be straigthforwardly applied to any transducer geometry, including 2D sparse arrays for 3D super-resolution PA and US imaging.