Photoacoustic clutter reduction by inversion of a linear scatter model using plane wave ultrasound measurements.

Photoacoustic imaging aims to visualize light absorption properties of biological tissue by receiving a sound wave that is generated inside the observed object as a result of the photoacoustic effect. In clinical applications, the strong light absorption in human skin is a major problem. When high amplitude photoacoustic waves that originate from skin absorption propagate into the tissue, they are reflected back by acoustical scatterers and the reflections contribute to the received signal.

Optimized SNR simultaneous multispectral photoacoustic imaging with laser diodes.

Multispectral photoacoustic laser diode systems have multiple wavelengths available simultaneously. In addition to multispectral imaging, this can be exploited to increase the signal to noise ratio (SNR) by combining these wavelengths to form a combined image, but at the loss of spectral information. Here, a novel signal processing concept is introduced, which optimizes the SNR in the reconstructions of single wavelength data from combined acquisitions while simultaneously permitting to obtain a higher SNR fused image from the same data.

Size-dependent multispectral photoacoustic response of solid and hollow gold nanoparticles.

Photoacoustic (PA) imaging attracts a great deal of attention as an innovative modality for longitudinal, non-invasive, functional and molecular imaging in oncology. Gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) are identified as superior, NIR-absorbing PA contrast agents for biomedical applications. Until now, no systematic comparison of the optical extinction and PA efficiency of water-soluble AuNPs of various geometries and small sizes has been performed.

Multispectral photoacoustic coded excitation imaging using unipolar orthogonal Golay codes.

We present a method to speed up the acquisition of multispectral photoacoustic data sets by using unipolar orthogonal Golay codes as excitation sequences for the irradiation system. Multispectral photoacoustic coded excitation (MS-PACE) allows acquiring photoacoustic data sets for two irradiation wavelengths simultaneously and separating them afterwards, thus improving the SNR or speeding up the measurement. We derive an analytical estimation of the SNR improvement using MS-PACE compared to time equivalent averaging.