Adaptive optics multispectral photoacoustic imaging

Abstract

Photoacoustic imaging is an advanced medical imaging technology based on the effect of ultrasound generation by electromagnetic irradiation. However in photoacoustic imaging, because the optical property of tissue is always very complex, the aberration of light in tissue is ineluctable and the image spot is dispersed, which greatly influences the photoacoustic image resolution. For improving the lateral resolution of photoacoustic imaging, the adaptive optics multispectral photoacoustic imaging system is proposed in this paper. In this system an adaptive optics sub-system is designed to correct the wavefront errors of the illuminating light for obtaining high-resolution images of biological tissues. Moreover, the multispectral imaging is combined to obtain different wavelength photoacoustic images, which is useful for distinguishing organization accurate structure, identifying organizational components, etc. The simulation results demonstrate that when the wavefront errors are corrected by the adaptive optics system, the image resolution and quality are improved significantly. This research will be helpful for improving the ability and application of photoacoustic imaging.