Negative lens concept for photoacoustic tomography.
Although a small point ultrasound transducer has a wide acceptance angle, its small active area leads to a high thermal-noise-induced electric voltage in the transducer, thus the sensitivity is low. By contrast, a finite-size flat transducer has high sensitivity, but the acceptance angle is small, which limits its application in reconstruction-based photoacoustic tomography (PAT). Here, we propose a negative lens concept to increase the acceptance angle of a flat transducer without losing sensitivity. Phantom experiments demonstrate that use of this concept greatly increases the detection region for PAT with high sensitivity.
Li
Changhui
C
Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. CLi@biomed.wustl.edu
Ku
Geng
G
Wang
Lihong V
LV
D000162:Acoustics; D041622:Tomography, Optical / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D014159:Transducers