Correction for acoustic attenuation effects in optoacoustic tomographic reconstructions

The feasibility of correcting for the effects of acoustic attenuation in optoacoustic tomographic reconstructions obtained with model-based inversion is shown in this work. Acoustic attenuation is a physical phenomenon that takes place inevitably in actual acoustic media and becomes significant at high ultrasonic frequencies. The frequency dependence of acoustic attenuation and the associated dispersion lead to reduction of amplitude and broadening of the optoacoustic signals, which in turn cause, respectively, quantification errors and loss of resolution in the reconstructed images. In this work we imaged an agar phantom with embedded microparticles in three different scenarios, namely with the signals acquired with no attenuation, with the signals collected by placing an attenuating sample in between the phantom and the ultrasonic transducer and with the signals corrected for the effects of acoustic attenuation. The results obtained show that the quantification inaccuracies and the loss of resolution of the images can be partially corrected at the expense of introducing noise at high spatial frequencies due to the amplification of the high frequency components of the noise in the signals.