High-contrast photoacoustic imaging through scattering media using correlation detection of adaptive time window

Abstract

Photoacoustic imaging has the advantages of high contrast and deep imaging depth. However, with the increasing of imaging depth, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the detected signal decreases, due to the light scattering that seriously affects the recovery image quality. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrated that higher contrast photoacoustic imaging was achieved using photoacoustic wavefront shaping technology in the presence of light scattering and low SNR signals. The imaging contrast is improved from 1.51 to 5.30. More importantly, we propose a dynamic time window method for the photoacoustic signal extraction algorithm, named correlation detection of adaptive time window, which further improves the contrast of photoacoustic imaging to 9.57. Our method effectively improves the contrast of photoacoustic imaging through scattering media.