  Noninvasive transcranial photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) of the
human brain, despite its clinical potential, remains impeded by the acoustic
distortion induced by the human skull. The distortion, which is attributed to
the markedly different material properties of the skull relative to soft
tissue, results in heavily aberrated PACT images -- a problem that has remained
unsolved in the past two decades. Herein, we report the first successful
experimental demonstration of the de-aberration of PACT images through an
ex-vivo adult human skull using a homogeneous elastic model for the skull.
Using only the geometry, position, and orientation of the skull, we accurately
de-aberrate the PACT images of light-absorbing phantoms acquired through an
ex-vivo human skull, in terms of the recovered phantom features, for different
levels of phantom complexity and positions. Our work addresses the longstanding
challenge of skull-induced aberrations in transcranial PACT and advances the
field towards unlocking the full potential of transcranial human brain PACT.
