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Updated: May 29, 2026

Three-dimensional Optical-resolution Photoacoustic Microscopy
Published on: May 3, 2011
Three-dimensional photoacoustic tomography based on the focal-line concept
Jun Xia1, Zijian Guo, Konstantin Maslov
1Washington University in St. Louis, Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.
Abstract:
A full ring ultrasonic array-based photoacoustic tomography system was recently developed for small animal brain imaging. The 512-element array is cylindrically focused in the elevational direction, and can acquire a two-dimensional (2D) image in 1.6 s. In this letter, we demonstrate the three-dimensional (3D) imaging capability of this system. A novel 3D reconstruction algorithm was developed based on the focal-line concept. Compared to 3D images acquired simply by stacking a series of 2D images, the 3D focal-line reconstruction method renders images with much less artifacts, and improves the elevational resolution by 30% and the signal-to-noise ratio by two times. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was first validated by numerical simulations and then demonstrated with a hair phantom experiment and an ex vivo mouse embryo experiment.
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