Data supplementing the paper "Digital twins enable full-reference quality assessment of photoacoustic image reconstructions"

This data repository accompanies the paper, which introduces a digital twin framework to enable full-reference image quality assessment (IQA) in photoacoustic tomography. In conventional experiments, quantitative comparison of reconstruction algorithms is challenging because no-reference IQA measures are often inadequate, and full-reference measures require a known ideal reference image (which is unavailable for real tissue or physical phantoms). The paper’s approach overcomes this by using numerical tissue-mimicking phantoms and a model of the imaging system as a digital twin of the experiment. By calibrating the simulations to match experimental data, the authors create a reference object that is close to a “ground truth” and corresponding simulated sensor data that mimic the real experiment, thus reducing the simulation-experiment gap. Using this digital twin, the paper quantitatively compares multiple state-of-the-art image reconstruction algorithms for photoacoustic imaging. Among these is a fast Fourier transform-based reconstruction algorithm for circular detection geometries, which is tested on experimental data for the first time. The results demonstrate that the digital phantom twin approach enables rigorous, full-reference IQA of reconstructions: for example, the Fourier algorithm achieved image quality comparable to iterative time reversal but at significantly lower computational cost. This highlights the utility of the digital twin framework for assessing reconstruction accuracy and the fidelity of the forward model, facilitating fair comparisons of different algorithms. If you use this code or data in your research, please cite the corresponding paper. Janek Gröhl, Leonid Kunyansky, Jenni Poimala, Thomas R. Else, Francesca Di Cecio, Sarah E. Bohndiek, Ben T. Cox, and Andreas Hauptmann, “Digital twins enable full-reference quality assessment of photoacoustic image reconstructions” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 2025.