Image reconstruction method for photoacoustic imaging accounting for impulse responses and directivity of ultrasonic detector

In photoacoustic imaging, image reconstruction suffers from the assumption of an ideal point detector with omnidirectional response, resulting in a degradation in the resolution of the reconstructed image. An image reconstruction method that takes into account the impulse responses and directionality of the ultrasonic detector is proposed in this paper. A high-quality image representing the optical absorption distribution is reconstructed by iteratively solving the inverse problem of the forward model incorporating the detector directivity and impulse response. Results of simulation and phantom experiments show that the proposed method can significantly improve image resolution and contrast compared with traditional reconstruction methods and other reconstruction enhancement methods that do not or not fully account for detector characteristics.