Hyper-Beam Photoacoustic Array Imaging

Delay-and-sum (DAS) beamformation, i.e., backprojection, is the most common image reconstruction algorithm for photoacoustic (PA) array imaging. Even though it suffers poor lateral resolution and poor imaging contrast, its low computational-complexity still keeps it a compromising solution. Algorithms such as delay-multiply-and-sum beamformation and minimum-variance beamformer have been proposed to overcome the above issues at the price of high computational-complexity. In this study, we propose a novel image reconstruction technique-hyper-beamforming (HBF) which is able to improve precision and imaging contrast with low computational-complexity. Simulation results show that compared with DAS, our proposed HBF has more than 90% improvement on precision, and significantly suppress sidelobe level.