Abstract

Current research has been extensively focusing on translating photoacoustic imaging into clinics using ultrasound handheld probes. However, a major drawback of these probes is the occurrence of artifacts which might lead to critical image misinterpretation. In-plane and out-of-plane artifacts are the two types of the artifacts in photoacoustic imaging. Recently we have reported a method for identifying reflection artifacts (in-plane artifacts). In this work, we propose a new method for removing out-of-plane artifacts by displacing the transducer array. Using transducer array displacement, out-of-plane artifacts can be de-correlated with in-plane image features and thus removed. We experimentally demonstrated this method with experiments in phantoms as well as in vivo. Results show that this is a promising approach for correcting out-of-plane artifacts.

© 2019 SPIE/OSA