Abstract
High-performance imaging is essential for widespread applications of photoacoustic tomography (PAT) in biomedicine. So far, no comprehensive studies are reported on the impact of system factors on imaging performance, in spite of their importance. Based on a prototype PAT scanner, we study eight factors associated with the acoustic reception process in PAT, namely, detector view angle, element number, center frequency, bandwidth, aperture size, focusing, orientation error, and scan step angle error, and investigated how they impact on the image quality. Simulations and experiments are both presented to support the findings in this study. This work is expected to provide a practical guide for advanced PAT scanner design with enhanced imaging performance.
Highlights
Based on the energy conversion of light into sound, photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging noninvasive biomedical imaging technique that has experienced explosive developments in the past two decades [1]
The detector view angle, refers to the angle enclosed by the detector during the measurement and has a profound impact on final image quality
The detector should completely enclose the sample for perfect image reconstruction; indicating a 4π steradian view angle ( = 4π ) for three-dimensional (3D) detection and a 2π radian view angle ( = 2π ) for two-dimensional (2D) detection are preferred
Summary
Based on the energy conversion of light into sound, photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging noninvasive biomedical imaging technique that has experienced explosive developments in the past two decades [1]. PAT has unique applications in a range of biomedical fields [4,5], such as cell biology [6,7,8,9], neurology [10,11,12], oncology [13,14], rheumatology [15], and ophthalmology [16,17]. Both basic sciences and clinical translations involving PAT are expected to grow in the future
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