Investigating large 2D arrays for photoacoustic and acoustic imaging using CMUT technology

In this paper, we investigate using a large aperture (64 times 64 element array) to perform photoacoustic and acoustic imaging by mechanically scanning a smaller array (16 times 16 elements) of capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs). We show results from the imaging of: 1) A fishing-line phantom. 2) Tubes embedded in chicken breast tissue containing the contrast agent indocyanine green (ICG), pig blood and a mixture of the two. The tubes were embedded at a depth of 0.8 cm inside the tissue and were at an overall distance of 1.9 cm from the CMUT array. Three-dimensional volume rendered images of traditional pulse-echo data as well as photoacoustic data are shown.