This paper reports the development of a new charge amplification approach for photoacoustic tomography (PAT) based on parallel acoustic delay line (PADL) arrays. By using a PADL array to create different time delays, multiple-channel PA signals can be received simultaneously with a single-element transducer followed by single-channel DAQ electronics for image reconstruction. Unlike the conventional voltage amplifiers whose output voltage drops with increasing transducer capacitance, both theoretical analysis and experimental results have shown that the charge amplification can provide almost constant transducer-amplifier gain, which is not affected by the transducer capacitance. Therefore, it allows the use of a large single-element transducer to interface many PADLs without sacrificing the SNR of each channel. This opens the possibility of using large PADL arrays to achieve PAT with a wide field of view and high lateral resolution.
In this paper, we report a new photoacoustic sensing probe design consisting of two optical fibers. One optical fiber is used for delivering the excitation light pulses. The other one serves as an acoustic delay line to relay the generated PA signal from the target to an outside ultrasound transducer. With the addition of suitable time delay, the original PA signal can be easily separated from the interference signals. To demonstrate this new design, a prototype probe was designed, fabricated and tested. The PA sensing performance was characterized with different concentration of black and red dye solutions. The testing results show that the PA sensing probe can provide good sensitivity and maintain high linearity over a wide range of concentrations. The detection of bovine blood embedded into chicken breast tissue was also conducted to demonstrate its potential usefulness for in-vivo applications.
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