RF and microwave photonics in biomedical applications

摘要

This paper addresses various "Microwave Photonics" techniques developed for biomedical applications. The first application is using RF photonics technique for calibration of ultrasound transducers operating at high-frequencies without spatial field averaging compromise. In particular a broadband fiber-optic based hydrophone probe is reported for measurements of acoustic fields at the frequencies up to 100 MHz. The fiber probe with a tip diameter of about 8 microns provides a desirable measurement tool eliminating the need for spatial averaging corrections. Power budget calculation of the fiber sensor set-up indicated that high power (200 mW) laser source is essential to achieve adequate signal-to-noise ratio. The results of the preliminary measurements allowed the probe sensitivity to be determined. Improvements to the measurement arrangements are discussed to bring this sensitivity (about 1.7mV/MPa) in line with that theoretically calculated (4.3mV/MPa). On the other hand the second application of microwave photonics is in the diffused photon near infra-red spectroscopy. A custom designed broadband NIR spectroscopy system is reported. A high-speed high power optical transmitter is designed over the frequency range from 100MHz up to 3GHz Phantom experiments are performed to extract optical parameters of a turbid media simulating a breast tissue. Both broadband and single-frequency extraction methods are used to extract optical parameters of the phantom model. The comparison shows that the achieved extraction accuracy of optical parameter (μa, μs') using broadband extraction method is better than the single frequency technique.