Iterative Photoacoustic Reconstruction in Heterogeneous Media using the Kaczmarz Method

The aim of a photoacoustic image reconstruction is to locate acoustic sources that originate from laser irradiation. Many conventional one-step methods suffer from artifacts caused by simplifications in their derivation. For example, the limited view of most detection systems is usually not considered. Recently, several iterative reconstruction algorithms have been proposed that are able to approximate the original distribution more accurately. Some of them have been shown to reduce the influence of a limited view. However, the efficiency of these algorithms is usually only assessed on a circular detection setup. Also, acoustic medium heterogeneities are often neglected. We propose a new iterative reconstruction algorithm that can be applied to linear array acquisitions and considers known medium heterogeneities. The approach is based on the Kaczmarz method as commonly used in Computed Tomography.