Imaging a spatially confined photoacoustic source defined by a distribution of plasmonic nanoparticles

This paper describes the use of plasmonic nanoparticles in photoacoustic imaging. When acoustic waves are generated by thermoacoustic expansion in the fluid medium surrounding a distribution of these particles and the acoustic signals are recorded over a planar aperture, a bandlimited image of this distribution can be reconstructed. It is shown that the accessible portion of the three-dimensional spatial Fourier transform of the unknown source distribution is a spherical shell in k-space, with the core representing missing low-frequency Fourier components of the source density. When the source arises from an isolated distribution of nanoparticles, the iterative Gerchberg-Papoulis procedure can be applied to recover the low-frequency Fourier components. It is shown that this version of the photoacoustic source reconstruction problem is well suited for the use of this procedure. In this way, the fidelity of the image of the photoacoustic-generated source defined by the particle concentration can be enhanced. The procedure is illustrated using simulated data derived from a hypothetical source distribution. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

Duke Scholars

Author Tuan Vo-Dinh Biomedical Engineering