Validation of delay-multiply-and-standard-deviation weighting factor for improved photoacoustic imaging of sentinel lymph node

• Main Authors: Paridar, Roya, Pramanik, Manojit, Orooji, Mahdi, Periyasamy, Vijitha, Mehrmohammadi, Mohammad, Mozaffarzadeh, Moein, Basij, Maryam
• Other Authors: School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Image Reconstruction; DRNTU::Engineering::Chemical engineering; Noise Suppression
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/93621; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/48756
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Delay-and-sum (DAS) is one of the most common algorithms used to construct the photoacoustic images due to its low complexity. However, it results in images with high sidelobes and low resolution. Delay-and-standard-deviation (DASD) weighting factor can improve the contrast of the images compared to DAS. However, it still suffers from high sidelobes. In this work, a new weighting factor, named delay-multiply-and-standard-deviation (DMASD) is introduced to enhance the contrast of the reconstructed images compared to other mentioned methods. In the proposed method, the standard deviation of the mutual multiplied delayed signals are calculated, normalized and multiplied to DAS beamformed data. The results show that DMASD improves the signal-to-noise-ratio about 19.29 dB and 7.3 dB compared to DAS and DASD, respectively, for in vivo imaging of the sentinel lymph node. Moreover, the contrast-ratio is improve by the DMASD about 23.61 dB and 10.81 dB compared to DAS and DASD, respectively.