Size-adjustable ring-shape photoacoustic tomography imager in vivo

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has become a novel biomedical imaging modality for scientific research and clinical diagnosis. It combines the advantages of spectroscopic optical absorption contrast and acoustic resolution with deep penetration. In this article, an imaging size-adjustable PAT system is proposed for potential clinical applications such as breast cancer detection and screening, which can adapt to imaging targets with various sizes. Comparing with the conventional PAT setup with a fixed radius ring shape ultrasound transducer (UT) array, the proposed system is more flexible for imaging diverse size targets based on sectorial ultrasound transducer arrays (SUTAs). Four SUTAs form a 128-channel UT array for photoacoustic detection, where each SUTA has 32 elements. Such four SUTAs are controlled by four stepper motors, respectively, and can change their distribution layout position to adapt for various imaging applications. In this proposed system, the radius of the imaging region of interest (ROI) can be adjusted from 50 to 100 mm, which is much more flexible than the conventional PAT system with a full ring UT array. The simulation experiments using the MATLAB k-wave toolbox demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system. To further validate the proposed system, imaging of pencil leads made phantom, ex-vivo pork breast with indocyanine green (ICG) injected, and in-vivo human wrist, finger and ankle are conducted to prove its feasibility for potential clinical applications.