Abstract
Geometric calibration of ultrasound transducer arrays is critical to optimizing the performance of photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) systems. We present a geometric calibration method that is applicable to a wide range of PACT systems. We obtain the speed of sound and point source locations using surrogate methods, which results in a linear problem in the transducer coordinates. We characterize the estimation error, which informs our choice of the point source arrangement. We demonstrate our method in a three-dimensional PACT system and show that our method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio, the size, and the spread of point source reconstructions by (80 ± 19)%, (19 ± 3)%, and (7 ± 1)%, respectively. We reconstruct the images of a healthy human breast before and after calibration and find that the calibrated image reveals vasculatures that were previously invisible. Our work introduces a method for geometric calibration in PACT and paves the way for improving PACT image quality.