Development of Low-Cost Fast Photoacoustic Computed Tomography: System Characterization and Phantom Study

Abstract

A low-cost Photoacoustic Computed Tomography (PACT) system consisting of 16 single-element transducers has been developed. Our design proposes a fast rotating mechanism of 360° rotation around the imaging target, generating comparable images to those produced by large-number-element (e.g., 512, 1024, etc.) ring-array PACT systems. The 2D images with a temporal resolution of 1.5 s and a spatial resolution of 240 µm were achieved. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated by imaging complex phantom. The purpose of the proposed development is to provide researchers a low-cost alternative 2D photoacoustic computed tomography system with comparable resolution to the current high performance expensive ring-array PACT systems.