Abstract
Recent progress in photoacoustic imaging has shown its potential in biomedical imaging of biological tissues in vivo because it can offer the imaging contrast comparable to the optical techniques and the imaging resolution similar to the ultrasonic techniques. However, its imaging depth and contrast have a dependence on the optical properties of surrounding medium that has not yet investigated. Therefore, the understanding of how the tissue optical properties affect the performance of photoacoustic imaging would be important. In this paper, we investigate the influence of absorption and scattering coefficients of surrounding tissue on the measured acoustic signal generated from the photoacoustic source of interest. In the experiments, tissue phantoms were constructed with a range of optical properties. We used the intralipid solution to control the scattering property, and the methylene blue to control the absorption property of the phantom. The results show that the absorption and scattering coefficient of surrounding medium is one of major factors that affect the photoacoustic imaging depth and contrast.
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