Simultaneous three-dimensional photoacoustic and laser-ultrasound tomography.

A tomographic setup that provides the co-registration of photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound (US) images is presented. For pulse-echo US-tomography laser-induced broadband plane ultrasonic waves are produced by illuminating an optically absorbing target with a short near-infrared laser pulse. Part of the same pulse is frequency doubled and used for the generation of PA waves within the object of interest. The laser-generated plane waves are scattered at the imaging object and measured with the same interferometric detector that also acquires the photoacoustic signals. After collection and separation of the data image reconstruction is done using back-projection resulting in three-dimensional, co-registered PA and US images. The setup is characterized and the resolution in PA and US mode is estimated to be about 85 µm and 40 µm, respectively. Besides measurements on phantoms the performance is also tested on a biological sample.