  In Photoacoustic imaging (PA), Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamformer is a common
beamforming algorithm having a simple implementation. However, it results in a
poor resolution and high sidelobes. To address these challenges, a new
algorithm namely Delay-Multiply-and-Sum (DMAS) was introduced having lower
sidelobes compared to DAS. To improve the resolution of DMAS, a novel
beamformer is introduced using Minimum Variance (MV) adaptive beamforming
combined with DMAS, so-called Minimum Variance-Based DMAS (MVB-DMAS). It is
shown that expanding the DMAS equation results in multiple terms representing a
DAS algebra. It is proposed to use the MV adaptive beamformer instead of the
existing DAS. MVB-DMAS is evaluated numerically and experimentally. In
particular, at the depth of 45 mm MVB-DMAS results in about 31 dB, 18 dB and 8
dB sidelobes reduction compared to DAS, MV and DMAS, respectively. The
quantitative results of the simulations show that MVB-DMAS leads to improvement
in full-width-half-maximum about 96 %, 94 % and 45 % and signal-to-noise ratio
about 89 %, 15 % and 35 % compared to DAS, DMAS, MV, respectively. In
particular, at the depth of 33 mm of the experimental images, MVB-DMAS results
in about 20 dB sidelobes reduction in comparison with other beamformers.
