Photoacoustic Imaging

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) presents a new non-invasive imaging modality that has great potential in medical applications, most promising in early stage breast cancer diagnostics and imaging of small animals The principle of photoacoustic tomography is the so called photoacoustic effect which is based on a conversion of light energy into acoustic waves. For medical applications acoustic waves are generated inside tissue by stimulating it with short laser pulses which cause acoustic waves. The acoustic waves are then measured outside of the tissue and converted (using mathematical algorithms) into a three dimensional image.

Differently to the main approach, in this project integrals of the acoustic waves over planes [1], lines [2], [3], and recently over circles [4] are used for imaging. Circular and linear detectors, for example, can be realized by a laser beam that is guided along a circle or a line in an optical fiber in some kind of an interferometric set-up. The advantage of this technique is that it leads to images with high resolution and high contrast due to the high measurement accuracy of integrating detectors.

References


Contributors


Markus Haltmeier, Otmar Scherzer, Gerhard Zangerl

Links


Contact

Computational Science Center
Faculty of Mathematics
University of Vienna

Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1
1090 Wien
T: +43-1-4277-55771