Transcranial Photoacoustic Tomography De-Aberrated Using Boundary Elements

Photoacoustic tomography holds tremendous potential for neuroimaging due to its functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-like functional contrast and greater specificity, richer contrast, portability, open platform, faster imaging, magnet-free and quieter operation, and lower cost. However, accounting for the skull-induced acoustic distortion remains a long-standing challenge due to the problem size. This is aggravated in functional imaging, where high accuracy is needed to detect minuscule functional changes. Here, we develop an acoustic solver based on the boundary-element method (BEM) to model the skull and de-aberrate the images. BEM uses boundary meshes and compression for superior computational efficiency compared to volumetric discretization-based methods. We demonstrate BEM's higher accuracy and favorable scalability relative to the widely used pseudo-spectral time-domain method (PSTD). In imaging through an ex-vivo adult human skull, BEM outperforms PSTD in several metrics. Our work establishes BEM as a valuable and naturally suited technique in photoacoustic tomography and lays the foundation for BEM-based de-aberration methods.