The imaging property of photoacoustic Fourier imaging and tomography using an acoustic lens imaging system

The theory of photoacoustic tomography imaging using an acoustic lens imaging system has been investigated, and the photoacoustic (PA) Fourier imaging property of an acoustic lens is presented. The theoretical results show that an acoustic lens is able to realize two-dimensional PA Fourier imaging and the focal depth of the acoustic lens is 20 mm. The PA signals with the advantage of time resolution can be resolved in time domain by time-resolved technique. Therefore, this long focal depth characteristic of the acoustic lens can be combined with time-resolved technique to realize PA tomography imaging. It is demonstrated by experiments that this method is able to provide PA tomography images of biological tissue. The images are clear and contrast sharply with their backgrounds. The depth resolution is 1.54 mm. (c) 2007 American Institute of Physics.