The Application of Genetic Algorithm in Photoacoustic Tomography

A Photo acoustic image reconstruction method based on genetic algorithm is first proposed for the circular scanning configuration of photo acoustic tomography when the scanning step is large and the number of detecting position is small. This method can also be used for circular sparse-array detection. It combines the properties of global search and potential parallelism of the genetic algorithm, thus the reconstructed images by using this algorithm could be highly accurate. in this work, the feasibility of this algorithm is confirmed by simulation, the reconstructed images can show the properties of the original image accurately with good resolution. and for comparison, first, the delay-and-sum algorithm is used to reconstruct the same original image with the same data detected by the transducer. in the reconstructed image the characteristic of the original image can hardly be recognized. then much more sampled data is used for image reconstruction by delay-and-sum algorithm, the reconstructed image still has a bad resolution. by doing these comparisons the superiority of the photo acoustic image reconstruction algorithm based on genetic algorithm is fully demonstrated.