Washington University in St. Louis, Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Biomedical Engineering, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.
J Biomed Opt. 2011 Sep;16(9):090505. doi: 10.1117/1.3625576.
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.
最近开发了一种基于全环超声阵列的光声断层成像系统,用于小动物脑成像。该 512 元阵列在垂直方向上进行圆柱聚焦,可以在 1.6 秒内获取二维(2D)图像。在这封信中,我们展示了该系统的三维(3D)成像能力。基于焦线概念开发了一种新的 3D 重建算法。与通过堆叠一系列 2D 图像简单地获取 3D 图像相比,3D 焦线重建方法生成的图像伪影更少,并将垂直分辨率提高了 30%,信噪比提高了两倍。该算法的有效性首先通过数值模拟进行了验证,然后通过头发仿体实验和离体小鼠胚胎实验进行了验证。