We compare scanned-mosaicking and blanket illumination schemes for wide-field photoacoustic tomography with potential applications to breast imaging. For each illumination, a locally high-SNR image patch is reconstructed then mosaicked with image patches from other illuminations. Because the beam is not diffused over the entire area, the fluence of the beam can be maximized, therefore maximizing the signal generated. Moreover, the imaging can potentially still be done fast enough within a breath-hold. A Monte Carlo simulation as a function of beam-spot size and depth is performed to quantify this signal gain. We experimentally test both schemes using a 256-element Imasonic ring array on a tissue-mimicking phantom. We were able to verify the simulated signal gain of 2.9x under 0.5 cm of tissue with the experimental data, and measured the signal gain decrease expected when imaging deeper into the tissue. We also measured the effectiveness of averaging the diffused beam versus the scanned-mosaicking approach, and observed that for the same scan times and limited laser power output, scanned-mosaicking was able to produce a higher SNR than the blanket illumination approach. We have shown that this technique will allow wide-area PAT to utilize the maximum SNR available from any system while minimizing the number of acquisitions to reach this SNR.

Date Published: 11 March 2015
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9323, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2015, 93232V (11 March 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2079950

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9323:
Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2015
Alexander A. Oraevsky; Lihong V. Wang, Editor(s)