High Resolution Photoacoustic Standard CT for Quasi-3D Breast Cancer Imaging

A prototype of photoacoustic standard CT(PSCT) has been designed for high resolution quasi-3D photoacoustic tomography with a focused digital phased array transducer. To realize photoacoustic computed tomography, each element of the transducer array possess a thin cylinder ultrasonic lens to select 2D image plane and suppress the out-of-plane signals. The modified LFBP algorithm is utilized to reconstruct the 2D photoacoustic images. To reconstruct a 3D sample, the transducer array is rotated around a single axis just as a standard CT. The spatial and perpendicular resolution of our imaging system is determined as 0.2 mm and 1.5 mm in our experiment, respectively. The results demonstrate this system can provide a high resolution photoacoustic tomography interface applying to noninvasive detect early breast cancer.