Accelerating Model-based Photoacoustic Image Reconstruction in Vivo Based on S-Wave

Photoacoustic imaging technology develops very fast in recent years. As the most popular MATLAB toolbox for photoacoustic simulation, k-Wave is widely used in various photoacoustic applications by solving wave propagation equations, but suffering from long computation time. To accelerate photoacoustic simulation, we propose a straightforward simulation approach based on superposed Wave (s-Wave), which can be further applied to model-based reconstruction task. We evaluate s-Wave on several imaging conditions, and the result shows less time consumption compared with k-wave. Especially in a sparse configuration in 3D, it is more than 2000 times faster than k-Wave. For the model-based image reconstruction, in-vivo imaging result shows that using s-Wave method could suppress the noise and reserve the vessels better, while the reconstruction speed is about 50 times faster than k-wave.