Texture Generation for Photoacoustic Elastography
Elastographic imaging is a widely used technique which can in principle be implemented on top of every imaging modality. In elastography, the specimen is exposed to a force causing local displacements, and imaging is performed before and during the displacement experiment. The computed mechanical displacements can either directly be used for clinical diagnosis or deliver a basis for the deduction of material parameters. Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging image modality, which exhibits functional and morphological contrast. However, opposed to ultrasound imaging, for instance, it is considered a modality which is not suited for elastography, because it does not reveal speckle patterns. However, this is somehow counterintuitive, because photoacoustic imaging makes available the whole frequency spectrum as opposed to single frequency standard ultrasound imaging. In this work, we show that in fact artificial speckle patterns can be introduced by using only a band-limited part of the measurement data. We also show that after introduction of artificial speckle patterns, deformation estimation can be implemented more reliably in photoacoustic imaging.
texture elastography photoacoustic imaging