ABSTRACT
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a novel noninvasive imaging method of biological tissues, which is different from other imaging methods. It irradiates biological samples with short-pulse laser, biological tissues thermally expand in result of absorbing laser energy and produces ultrasonic pressure which is also referred to as photoacoustic signal, the ultrasonic transducer detects ultrasonic signals in all directions, then the light absorption distribution of biological tissues can be reconstructed with the detected signals by corresponding image reconstruction algorithms. This method combines the advantages of pure optical imaging and pure ultrasonic imaging, which has high resolution and high contrast.
