Approaching closed spherical, full-view detection for photoacoustic tomography.

Significance: Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a widely explored imaging modality and has excellent potential for clinical applications. On the acoustic detection side, limited-view angle and limited-bandwidth are common key issues in PAT systems that result in unwanted artifacts. While analytical and simulation studies of limited-view artifacts are fairly extensive, experimental setups capable of comparing limited-view to an ideal full-view case are lacking.

Aims: A custom ring-shaped detector array was assembled and mounted to a 6-axis robot, then rotated and translated to achieve up to 3.8π steradian view angle coverage of an imaged object.

Approach: Minimization of negativity artifacts and phantom imaging were used to optimize the system, followed by demonstrative imaging of a star contrast phantom, a synthetic breast tumor specimen phantom, and a vascular phantom.

Results: Optimization of the angular/rotation scans found ≈212 effective detectors were needed for high-quality images, while 15-mm steps were used to increase the field of view as required depending on the size of the imaged object. Example phantoms were clearly imaged with all discerning features visible and minimal artifacts.

Conclusions: A near full-view closed spherical system has been developed, paving the way for future work demonstrating experimentally the significant advantages of using a full-view PAT setup.