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.
Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. CLi@biomed.wustl.edu
Changhui
C
Li
Geng
G
Ku
Lihong V
LV
Wang
D000162:Acoustics; D041622:Tomography, Optical / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D014159:Transducers