Investigation of a diffuse optical measurements-assisted quantitative photoacoustic tomographic method in reflection geometry.

Photoacoustic tomography provides the distribution of absorbed optical energy density, which is the product of optical absorption coefficient and optical fluence distribution. We report the experimental investigation of a novel fitting procedure that quantitatively determines the optical absorption coefficient of chromophores. The experimental setup consisted of a hybrid system of a 64-channel photoacoustic imaging system with a frequency-domain diffused optical measurement system. The fitting procedure included a complete photoacoustic forward model and an analytical solution of a target chromophore using the diffusion approximation. The fitting procedure combines the information from the photoacoustic image and the background information from the diffuse optical measurements to minimize the photoacoustic measurements and forward model data and recover the target absorption coefficient quantitatively. 1-cm-cube phantom absorbers of high and low contrasts were imaged at depths of up to 3.0 cm. The fitted absorption coefficient results were at least 80% of their true values. The sensitivities of this fitting procedure to target location, target radius, and background optical properties were also investigated. We found that this fitting procedure was most sensitive to the accurate determination of the target radius and depth. Blood sample in a thin tube of radius 0.58 mm, simulating a blood vessel, was also studied. The photoacoustic images and fitted absorption coefficients are presented. These results demonstrate the clinical potential of this fitting procedure to quantitatively characterize small lesions in breast imaging.