Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) is recognized as a powerful tool for various microcirculation system studies. To improve the spatial resolution for the PAM images, the requirements of the system will always be increased correspondingly. Without additional cost of the system, we address the problem of improving the resolution of PAM images by integrating a deconvolution model with a directional total variation regularization. Additionally, we present a primal-dual-based algorithm to solve the associated optimization problem efficiently. Results from both test images and some PAM images studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in enhancing the spatial resolution. We expect the proposed technique to be an alternativeresolution enhancement tool for some important biomedical applications.

A new photoacoustic (PA) signal sampling and image reconstruction method, called compressive sampling PA tomography (CSPAT), is recently proposed to make low sampling rate and high-resolution PA tomography possible. A key problem within the CSPAT framework is the design of optic masks. We propose to use edge expander codes-based masks instead of the conventional random distribution masks, and efficient total variation (TV) regularization-based model to formulate the associated problem. The edge expander codes-based masks, corresponding to non-uniform sampling schemes, are validated by both theoretical analysis and results from computer simulations. The proposed method is expected to enhance the capability of CSPAT for reducing the number of measurements and fast data acquisition.

The photoacoustic tomography (PAT) method, based on compressive sensing (CS) theory, requires that, for the CS reconstruction, the desired image should have a sparse representation in a known transform domain. However, the sparsity of photoacoustic signals is destroyed because noises always exist. Therefore, the original sparse signal cannot be effectively recovered using the general reconstruction algorithm. In this study, Bayesian compressive sensing (BCS) is employed to obtain highly sparse representations of photoacoustic images based on a set of noisy CS measurements. Results of simulation demonstrate that the BCS-reconstructed image can achieve superior performance than other state-of-the-art CS-reconstruction algorithms.