A versatile dark-field acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy system aided by 3D printing.

Since the dark-field acoustic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (AR-PAM) was invented over one decade ago, its powerful imaging capability made this system successful. In this work, we designed and tested an AR-PAM system whose key parts are relied on 3D printing and fiber bundles. This new design not only makes it much simpler to develop a robust PAM system, but also the illumination angle is adjustable to aid for different applications. Our simulation study and phantom experiments demonstrated that this design has the comparable performance with traditional dark-field AR-PAM.