title: Photoacoustic tomography of monkey brain using virtual point ultrasonic transducers.
abstract: A photoacoustic tomography system (PAT) using virtual point ultrasonic transducers was developed and applied to image a monkey brain. The custom-built transducers provide a 10-fold greater field-of-view (FOV) than finite-aperture unfocused transducers as well as an improved signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and reduced artifacts rather than negative-lens transducers. Their tangential resolution, radial resolution, and (SNR) improvements were quantified using tissue phantoms. Our PAT system can achieve high uniformity in both resolution (<1 mm) and SNR (>8) within a large FOV of 6 cm in diameter, even when the imaging objects are enclosed by a monkey skull. The cerebral cortex of a monkey brain was accurately mapped transcranially, through a skull ranging from 2 to 4 mm in thickness. This study demonstrates that PAT can overcome the optical and ultrasound attenuation of a relatively thick skull and can potentially be applied to human neonatal brain imaging.
authors.affiliation: Washington University in St. Louis, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Optical Imaging Laboratory, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1097, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.
authors.forename: Liming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nie
authors.forename: Zijian
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Guo
authors.forename: Lihong V
authors.initials: LV
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D002417:Cattle; D004453:Echoencephalography / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D059906:Neuroimaging / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D055620:Optical Phenomena; D041622:Tomography, Optical / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D014159:Transducers