Photoacoustic tomography system

Abstract

Based on the pulsed photoacoustic effect, we set up an experimental system to obtain bi-dimensional images of optically-opaque samples embedded within the bulk of turbid medium. The turbid medium was made of agar gel mixed with single-sized nanoparticles; with these materials we induce an optical absorption and an optical scattering like that appearing in human tissues. The PA signals are generated from the absorption processes in the buried target, and then traveling through the bulk of scatter medium. The optical absorption properties and the shape of target, defines the amplitude and shape of the PA signals. This time the laser pulses are set from a pulsed Nd: YAG laser, with pulse width of 10 ns, at rate repetition of 10 Hz and wavelength set at 1064 nm. The signals generated in this way are registered by means of an ultrasonic transducer with resonance cut at 10 MHz. The sample was rotated to obtain as many as 36 projections which are used to feed an image reconstruction forward-projection algorithm based on the Radon Transform. As result we obtain 2D tomographic slices of three different samples.