Abstract
All-optical ultrasound (AOUS) imaging, which uses light to both generate and detect ultrasound, is an emerging alternative to conventional electronic ultrasound imaging. To date, AOUS imaging has been performed using paradigms that either resulted in long acquisition times or employed bench-top imaging systems that were impractical for clinical use. In this work, we present a novel AOUS imaging paradigm where scanning optics are used to rapidly synthesise an imaging aperture. This paradigm enabled the first AOUS system with a flexible, handheld imaging probe, which represents a critical step towards clinical translation. This probe, which provides video-rate imaging and a real-time display, is demonstrated with phantoms and in vivo human tissue.
Highlights
All-optical ultrasound (AOUS) imaging, which uses light to both generate and detect ultrasound signals, is an emerging alternative to conventional electronic ultrasound technology that employs piezoelec tric or capacitive transducers
We introduce a third AOUS imaging paradigm, which
Dynamic imaging of a tissue-mimicking phantom confirmed that the handheld AOUS imaging probe achieved sufficient sensitivity to clearly visualise the walls of an emulated blood vessel, and in addition was capable of monitoring the placement of a needle in real-time and at video-rate (Fig. 4 and Supplementary Movie 1)
Summary
All-optical ultrasound (AOUS) imaging, which uses light to both generate and detect ultrasound signals, is an emerging alternative to conventional electronic ultrasound technology that employs piezoelec tric or capacitive transducers. AOUS imaging has previously been demonstrated on the benchtop with systems that use scanning optics to arbitrarily and dynamically steer excitation light across a large monolithic optical ul trasound generator surface This generating surface was either deposited onto the distal end of a semi-rigid coherent fibre bundle [20] (achieving 3D imaging using a probe with a diameter of 3 mm) or a planar FabryPerot scanner [21], or suspended in freespace [9,22,23] to achieve arbitrary source aperture geometries. Using highly efficient nanocomposites comprised of carbon nanotubes and polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) [2] as optical ultrasound generating membranes, in combina tion with a highly sensitive fibre-optic ultrasound detector [5,24], realtime and video-rate 2D imaging was achieved [22,25] These benchtop imaging systems were unsuitable for clinical use as either the imaging target needed to be fully submerged into a water bath, or long acquisition times were required. We will present, to the authors’ knowledge, the first freehand, video-rate and real-time 2D all-optical ultrasound imaging of both dy namic phantoms and in vivo human tissue
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