A Method to Obtain the Transducers Impulse Response (TIR) in Photoacoustic Imaging

Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging imaging technique with great potential for a wide range of biomedical imaging applications. The transducers impulse response (TIR) is a key factor affecting the performance of photoacoustic imaging (PAI). It is customary in PAI to assume that TIR is known or obtain it from experiments. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of obtaining TIR in another way. A new method is proposed to extract TIR from observed optoacoustic signal (OPAS) data, without prior knowledge, as a known condition. It is based on the relation between the OPAS data and the photoacoustic pressure signal (PAPS) at transducer positions. The relation can be expressed as a homogeneous linear equation. The TIR is solved by solving the homogeneous equation. The numerical test verifies the effectiveness of the presented method. This article also discusses the effect of calculation parameters on the extracting precision of TIR.