Pencil beam all-optical ultrasound imaging

Erwin J Alles; Sacha Noimark; Edward Zhang; Paul C Beard; Adrien E Desjardins

doi:10.1364/BOE.7.003696

Pencil beam all-optical ultrasound imaging

Biomed Opt Express. 2016 Aug 26;7(9):3696-3704. doi: 10.1364/BOE.7.003696. eCollection 2016 Sep 1.

Authors

Erwin J Alles¹, Sacha Noimark², Edward Zhang¹, Paul C Beard¹, Adrien E Desjardins¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK.
² Department of Medical Physics and Biomedical Engineering, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK; Materials Chemistry Research Centre, UCL Department of Chemistry, London WC1H 0AJ, UK.

Abstract

A miniature, directional fibre-optic acoustic source is presented that employs geometrical focussing to generate a nearly-collimated acoustic pencil beam. When paired with a fibre-optic acoustic detector, an all-optical ultrasound probe with an outer diameter of 2.5 mm is obtained that acquires a pulse-echo image line at each probe position without the need for image reconstruction. B-mode images can be acquired by translating the probe and concatenating the image lines, and artefacts resulting from probe positioning uncertainty are shown to be significantly lower than those observed for conventional synthetic aperture scanning of a non-directional acoustic source. The high image quality obtained for excised vascular tissue suggests that the all-optical ultrasound probe is ideally suited for in vivo, interventional applications.

Keywords: (060.2380) Fiber optics sources and detectors; (110.2350) Fiber optics imaging; (110.5125) Photoacoustics; (170.0110) Imaging systems; (170.7170) Ultrasound.