Portable probe design for photoacoustic imaging in vivo

A low-cost adjustable illumination scheme for hand-held photoacoustic imaging probe is presented, manufactured and tested in this paper. Compared with traditional photoacoustic probe design, it has the following advantages: (1) Different excitation modes can be selected as needed. By tuning control parameters, it can achieve bright-field, dark-field, and hybrid field light illumination schemes. (2) The spot-adjustable unit (SAU) specifically designed for beam expansion, together with a water tank for transmitting ultrasonic waves, enable the device to break through the constraints of the transfer medium and is more widely used. The beam-expansion experiment is conducted to verify the function of SAU. After that, we built a PAT system based on our newly designed apparatus. Phantom and in vivo experimental results show different performance in different illumination schemes