A Problem of a Displacement Calculation of Tissue Surface in Non-Contact Photoacoustic Tomography

Background. Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a relatively new imaging modality,which allows e.g. visualizing the vascular network in biological tissue noninvasively. This tomographic method has an advantage in comparison to pure optical/acoustical methods due to high optical contrast and low acoustic scattering in deep tissue. The common PAT methodology, based on measurements of the acoustic pressure by piezoelectric sensors placed on the tissue surface, limits its practical versatility. A novel, completely non-contact and full-field PAT system is described. In noncontact PAT the measurement of surface displacement induced by the acoustic pressure at the tissue/air border is researched. Objective. To solve a simulation problem of the displacement calculation based on the medium pressure, which consists in deriving a formula for recalculating the pressure in the surface displacement based on the momentum conservation law, developing a simulation technique, and comparing the error of the proposed technique with the earlier used one. Methods. Comparing the experimental data with simulated pressure data in the k-Wave toolbox. The criterion of comparison is the relative quadratic error. Results. The simulation results of the displacement based on a new approach are more consistent with the experimental data than previous. The quadratic error numerical value of the new approach is 18 % and the previous is 71 %. Conclusions. The theoretical features of the surface displacement simulation are investigated and the solution of this problem is proposed based on momentum conservation law. The implementation of the proposed methodology has a four times smaller simulation error compared to the previous technique, so it can be implemented in the non-contact PAT. The residual error can be caused by the properties of the tissue, which are not taken into account in the model, which requires further research.