Photoacoustic tomography with a high lateral resolution and a large field of view using a rectangular focused ultrasound transducer

摘要

The enlargement of the field of view (FOV) of a photoacoustic (PA) tomography (PAT) system and the improvement of its lateral resolution are often two conflicting goals. A rectangular focused transducer is proposed to solve this problem. An asymmetric geometry of the transducer results in its asymmetric characteristics of the ultrasound (US) field. Both simulation and experiments confirm that the rectangular focused transducer can improve the FOV and lateral resolution of PAT systems simultaneously. The US transducer proposed in this study has the potential to improve the performance of a PAT system for practical biomedical applications. (C) 2016 The Japan Society of Applied Physics