Score-based generative model-assisted information compensation for high-quality limited-view reconstruction in photoacoustic tomography

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) regularly operates in limited-view cases owing to data acquisition limitations. The results using traditional methods in limited-view PAT exhibit distortions and numerous artifacts. Here, a novel limited-view PAT reconstruction strategy that combines model-based iteration with score-based generative model was proposed. By incrementally adding noise to the training samples, prior knowledge can be learned from the complex probability distribution. The acquired prior is then utilized as constraint in model-based iteration. The information of missing views can be gradually compensated by cyclic iteration to achieve high-quality reconstruction. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated with the circular phantom and in vivo experimental data. Experimental results demonstrate the outstanding effectiveness of the proposed method in limited-view cases. Notably, the proposed method exhibits excellent performance in limited-view case of 70° compared with traditional method. It achieves a remarkable improvement of 203% in PSNR and 48% in SSIM for the circular phantom experimental data, and an enhancement of 81% in PSNR and 65% in SSIM for in vivo experimental data, respectively. The proposed method has capability of reconstructing PAT images in extremely limited-view cases, which will further expand the application in clinical scenarios.