Photoacoustic (PA) tomography (PAT) has potential for use in brain imaging due to its rich\noptical contrast, high acoustic resolution in deep tissue, and good biosafety. However, the skull often\nposes challenges for transcranial brain imaging. The skull can cause severe distortion and attenuation\nof the phase and amplitude of PA waves, which leads to poor resolution, low contrast, and strong\nnoise in the images. In this study, we propose an image reconstruction method to recover the PA\nimage insider a skull-like scattering layer. This method reduces the scattering artifacts by combining\na correlation matrix filter and a time reversal operator. Both numerical simulations and PA imaging\nexperiments demonstrate that the proposed approach effectively improves the image quality with\nless speckle noise and better signal-to-noise ratio. The proposed method may improve the quality of\nPAT in a complex acoustic scattering environment, such as transcranial brain imaging.
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