Software-defined optoacoustic tomography.

In this work we present what we believe is the first application of software-defined optoelectronics (SDO) for bidimensional optoacoustic tomography (OAT). The SDO concept refers to optoelectronic systems where the functionality associated with the conditioning and processing of optical and electrical signals are digitally implemented and controlled by software. This paradigm takes advantage of the flexibility of software-defined hardware platforms to develop adaptive instrumentation systems. We implement an OAT system based on a heterodyne interferometer in a Mach-Zehnder configuration and a commercial software-defined radio platform (SDR). Here the SDR serves as a function generator and oscilloscope, while at the same time providing perfect carrier synchronization between its transmitter and receiver in a coherent baseband modulator scheme. This carrier synchronization enables us to have much better phase recovery. We study the performance of the OAT SDO system using different bidimensional phantoms and carry out an analysis of the reconstructed images.