We study the deep image prior (DIP) framework applied to photoacoustic tomography (PAT) as an unsupervised reconstruction approach to mitigate limited-view artifacts and noise commonly encountered in experimental settings. Efficient implementation is achieved by employing recently published fast forward and adjoint algorithms for circular measurement geometries. Initialization via a fast inverse and total variation (TV) regularization are applied to further suppress noise and mitigate overfitting. For comparison, we compute a classical TV reconstruction. Our experiments comprise simulated PAT measurements under limited-view geometries and varying levels of added noise as well as experimental measurements together with using a digital twin for quality assessment. Our findings suggest that DIP framework provides an effective unsupervised strategy for robust PAT reconstruction even in the challenging case of a limited view geometry providing improvement in several quantitative measures over total variation reconstructions.
@article{arxiv.2604.19176,
title = {Deep Image Prior for photoacoustic tomography can mitigate limited-view artifacts},
author = {Hanna Pulkkinen and Jenni Poimala and Leonid Kunyansky and Janek Gröhl and Andreas Hauptmann},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.19176},
year = {2026}
}