Abstract
In this paper, we report our latest progress on proving the concept that ultrasonic phased array can improve the detection sensitivity and field of view (FOV) in laser-scanning photoacoustic microscopy (LS-PAM). A LS-PAM system with a one-dimensional (1D) ultrasonic phased array was built for the experiments. The 1D phased array transducer consists of 64 active elements with an overall active dimension of 3.2 mm × 2 mm. The system was tested on imaging phantom and mouse ear in vivo. Experiments showed a 15 dB increase of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) when beamforming was employed compared to the images acquired with each single element. The experimental results demonstrated that ultrasonic phased array can be a better candidate for LS-PAM in high sensitivity applications like ophthalmic imaging.
Highlights
Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) [1,2,3,4,5] is an emerging high resolution three-dimensional imaging technology based on optical-absorption contrast
We report our latest progress on proving the concept that ultrasonic phased array can improve the detection sensitivity and field of view (FOV) in laser-scanning photoacoustic microscopy (LS-PAM)
A LS-PAM system with a one-dimensional (1D) ultrasonic phased array was built for the experiments
Summary
Photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) [1,2,3,4,5] is an emerging high resolution three-dimensional imaging technology based on optical-absorption contrast. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of PAM depends on the laser pulse energy and sensitivity of the ultrasonic transducer. Laser-scanning PAM (LS-PAM) is a branch of PAM [8,9,10] which can accomplish high speed in vivo imaging of biological tissues without scanning the ultrasonic transducer or the imaging subject. To achieve high speed imaging especially for ophthalmic applications, where scanning the ultrasonic transducer mechanically on the surface of the imaging subject is forbidden, LS-PAM uses a stationary ultrasonic transducer and only scans the illuminating laser light with an X-Y galvanometer scanner. An ultrasonic phased array is a transducer array consisting of multiple small transducer elements. Ultrasonic array transducer has been successfully used in mechanical scanning PAM system with multifocal optical illumination to improve the imaging speed significantly [11]. The current study is a proof of concept for the idea to apply ultrasonic phased array technique in LS-PAM
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