PAGS: Autofocusing Photoacoustic Tomography via Speed-of-Sound-Adaptive Gaussian Splatting

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging imaging modality that combines the complementary strengths of optical contrast and ultrasonic resolution. A central task is image reconstruction, where measured acoustic signals are used to recover the initial pressure distribution. For ideal point-like or line-like detectors, several efficient and fast reconstruction algorithms exist, including Fourier methods, filtered backprojection, and time reversal. However, when applied to data acquired with finite-size detectors, these methods yield systematically blurred images. Although sharper images can be obtained by compensating for finite-detector effects, supervised learning approaches typically require ground-truth images that may not be available in practice. We propose a self-supervised reconstruction method based on Noisier2Inverse that addresses finite-size detector effects without requiring ground-truth data. Our approach operates directly on noisy measurements and learns to recover high-quality PAT images in a ground-truth-free manner. Its key components are: (i) PAT-specific modeling that recasts the problem as angular deblurring; (ii) a Noisier2Inverse formulation in the polar domain that leverages the known angular point-spread function; and (iii) a novel, statistically grounded early-stopping rule. In experiments, the proposed method consistently outperforms alternative approaches that do not use supervised data and achieves performance close to supervised benchmarks, while remaining practical for real acquisitions with finite-size detectors.

Three-dimensional (3D) handheld photoacoustic tomography typically relies on bulky and expensive external positioning sensors to correct motion artifacts, which severely limits its clinical flexibility and accessibility. To address this challenge, we present PA-SFM, a tracker-free framework that leverages exclusively single-modality photoacoustic data for both sensor pose recovery and high-fidelity 3D reconstruction via differentiable acoustic radiation modeling. Unlike traditional structure-from-motion (SFM) methods based on visual features, PA-SFM integrates the acoustic wave equation into a differentiable programming pipeline. By leveraging a high-performance, GPU-accelerated acoustic radiation kernel, the framework simultaneously optimizes the 3D photoacoustic source distribution and the sensor array pose via gradient descent. To ensure robust convergence in freehand scenarios, we introduce a coarse-to-fine optimization strategy that incorporates geometric consistency checks and rigid-body constraints to eliminate motion outliers. We validated the proposed method through both numerical simulations and in-vivo rat experiments. The results demonstrate that PA-SFM achieves sub-millimeter positioning accuracy and restores high-resolution 3D vascular structures comparable to ground-truth benchmarks, offering a low-cost, software-defined solution for clinical freehand photoacoustic imaging. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/JaegerCQ/PA-SFM.

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) combines the optical absorption contrast of biological tissue with the spatial resolution of ultrasound, yet recovering the initial pressure distribution from sparse-view sensor measurements remains an ill-posed inverse problem. Iterative compressive-sensing solvers and unrolled deep networks both retain a dependence on the system matrix at inference, which leaves real-time clinical reconstruction computationally expensive. This paper proposes the Sensor Attention Network (SAN), a Transformer-based architecture that treats the full time series of each sensor as a token and maps raw measurements directly to the reconstructed image without invoking the system matrix at inference. For training and benchmarking, an analytical k-space H-matrix is constructed and validated against the k-Wave pseudo-spectral solver under matched geometry, achieving a mean per-sensor Pearson correlation of 0.919 +/- 0.049, with k-space apodization and Gaussian temporal damping acting synergistically to reduce the energy-normalized mismatch by 49%. Trained with a vessel-weighted loss on 488 augmented samples and evaluated on 46 held-out samples against ISTA, split-Bregman total variation (SBTV), and learned ISTA (LISTA), SAN attains the highest mean SSIM (0.522) and PSNR (22.09 dB) and the lowest NMSE (0.233). Paired t-tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests confirm the superiority of SAN over LISTA on PSNR, NMSE, and Pearson correlation at p < 1e-8, and over ISTA and SBTV on all fidelity metrics. By bypassing the H-matrix at inference, SAN reduces reconstruction time by at least an order of magnitude, supporting real-time PAT reconstruction.