Negative lens concept for photoacoustic tomography

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2008 Aug;78(2 Pt 1):021901. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.78.021901. Epub 2008 Aug 6.

Abstract

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural

MeSH terms

  • Acoustics*
  • Tomography, Optical / instrumentation
  • Tomography, Optical / methods*
  • Transducers