Motion Estimation and Correction in Photoacoustic Tomographic Reconstruction

Motion, e.g., due to patient movement or improper device calibration, is inevitable in many imaging modalities such as photoacoustic tomography (PAT) by a rotating system and can lead to undesirable motion artifacts in image reconstructions, if ignored. In this paper, we establish a hybrid-type model for PAT that incorporates motion in the model. We first introduce an approximate continuous model and establish two uniqueness results for simple parameterized motion models. Then we formulate the discrete problem of simultaneous motion estimation and image reconstruction as a separable nonlinear least squares problem and describe an automatic approach to detect and eliminate motion artifacts during the reconstruction process. Numerical examples validate our methods.