Phase-domain photoacoustic sensing

• Main Authors: Gao, Fei, Zhang, Ruochong, Feng, Xiaohua, Liu, Siyu, Ding, Ran, Kishor, Rahul, Qiu, Lei, Zheng, Yuanjin
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Photoacoustic imaging; Optical absorption
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/83359; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/42558
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

As one of the fastest-growing imaging modalities in recent years, photoacoustic imaging has attracted tremendous research interest for various applications including anatomical, functional, and molecular imaging. The majority of the photoacoustic imaging systems are based on the time-domain pulsed photoacoustic method, which utilizes a pulsed laser source to induce a wideband photoacoustic signal, revealing optical absorption contrast. An alternative way is the frequency-domain photoacoustic method utilizing the chirping modulation of laser intensity to achieve lower system cost. In this paper, we report another way of the photoacoustic method, called phase-domain photoacoustic sensing, which explores the phase difference between two consequent intensity-modulated laser pulse induced photoacoustic measurements to reveal the optical properties. The basic principle is introduced, modeled, and experimentally validated in this paper, which opens another potential pathway to perform photoacoustic sensing and imaging, eliminating acoustic detection variations beyond the conventional time-domain and frequency-domain photoacoustic methods.