Polymer-based ultrawideband transducers for high resolution hemispherical optoacoustic tomography

Available transducers do not fulfill all of the necessary design criteria for high-performance hemispherical optoacoustic tomography, namely: an ultrawide bandwidth in order to acquire the full range of optoacoustic emissions from targets of interest, good impedance matching to minimize reverberation artifacts, and a modifiable form factor, for inclusion in non-flat geometries. Polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) transducers can, in principle, meet all of these criteria, but PVDF has known shortcomings. In Ultrawideband high-density polymer-based spherical array for functional optoacoustic micro-angiography, all of the challenges of working with PVDF are overcome with the demonstration of a high-performance PVDF-based hemispherical optoacoustic tomographic system.