Deep Tissue Photoacoustic Imaging Using a Miniaturized 2-D Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducer Array

作者：Kothapalli Sri Rajasekhar; Ma Te Jen; Vaithilingam Srikant; Oralkan Oemer; Khuri Yakub Butrus T^*; Gambhir Sanjiv Sam

来源：IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, 2012, 59(5): 1199-1204.

DOI：10.1109/TBME.2012.2183593

• Capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer (CMUT) array
• deep tissue imaging
• optoacoustic
• photoacoustic

In this paper, we demonstrate 3-D photoacoustic imaging (PAI) of light absorbing objects embedded as deep as 5 cm inside strong optically scattering phantoms using a miniaturized (4 mm x 4 mm x 500 mu m), 2-D capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) array of 16 x 16 elements with a center frequency of 5.5 MHz. Two-dimensional tomographic images and 3-D volumetric images of the objects placed at different depths are presented. In addition, we studied the sensitivity of CMUT-based PAI to the concentration of indocyanine green dye at 5 cm depth inside the phantom. Under optimized experimental conditions, the objects at 5 cm depth can be imaged with SNR of about 35 dB and a spatial resolution of approximately 500 mu m. Results demonstrate that CMUTs with integrated front-end amplifier circuits are an attractive choice for achieving relatively high depth sensitivity for PAI.

• 出版日期2012-5