Optimization on artifacts in photoacoustic images based on spectrum analyses and signal extraction

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a promising technology for functional imaging of biological tissues, offering optical contrast and acoustic penetration depth. However, the presence of signal aliasing from multiple PA sources within the same imaging object can introduce artifacts and significantly impact the quality of the PA tomographic images. In this study, an optimized method is proposed to suppress these artifacts and enhance image quality effectively. By leveraging signal time-frequency spectrum, signals from each PA source can be extracted. Subsequently, the images are reconstructed using these extracted signals and fused together to obtain an optimized image. To verify this proposed method, PA imaging experiments were conducted on two phantoms and two in vitro samples and the distribution relative error and root mean square error of the images obtained through conventional and optimized methods were calculated. The results demonstrate that the proposed method successfully suppresses the artifacts and substantially improves the image quality.