New photoacoustic technique for detection of breast cancer

Abstract

Photoacoustic (PA) technique is a very important and promising biomedical diagnosis and imaging method, which can afford abundant information to analyze the pathological part of the tissue and image it. This paper proposes a new method to detect the PA wave. A focused probe ultrasonic beam was used to tag the position of PA signal and simultaneously overlapped with the PA signal, which in fact is carried out by the probe ultrasound. The overlapped signal is received by the transducer and will be further processed such as amplification and digitization. At last a compute analyzes and processes the digitized signal and the original PA signal can be restored by Fourier filtering. Furthermore, the noise of the measurement system and background could be reduced after filtering. On the basis of this method, we designed a novel setup to detect breast cancer tumor and the performance of this setup was evaluated in breast tissue-like phantom. The experiment results demonstrate the practicability of this technique.