Compressed sensing for photoacoustic computed tomography based on an untrained neural network with a shape prior

Photoacoustic (PA) computed tomography (PACT) shows great potential in various preclinical and clinical applications. A great number of measurements are the premise that obtains a high-quality image, which implies a low imaging rate or a high system cost. The artifacts or sidelobes could pollute the image if we decrease the number of measured channels or limit the detected view. In this paper, a novel compressed sensing method for PACT using an untrained neural network is proposed, which decreases a half number of the measured channels and recovers enough details. This method uses a neural network to reconstruct without the requirement for any additional learning based on the deep image prior. The model can reconstruct the image only using a few detections with gradient descent. As an unlearned strategy, our method can cooperate with other existing regularization, and further improve the quality. In addition, we introduce a shape prior to easily converge the model to the image. We verify the feasibility of untrained network-based compressed sensing in PA image reconstruction and compare this method with a conventional method using total variation minimization. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms 32.72% (SSIM) with the traditional compressed sensing method in the same regularization. It could dramatically reduce the requirement for the number of transducers, by sparsely sampling the raw PA data, and improve the quality of PA image significantly.