Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Abstract
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) suppresses speckles by prominent boundary buildups. We theoretically study the dependence of PAT speckles on the boundary roughness, which is quantified by the root-mean-squared (RMS) value and the correlation length of the height. The speckle visibility and the correlation coefficient between the reconstructed and actual boundaries are quantified as a function of the boundary roughness. The statistics of PAT speckles is studied experimentally