Photoacoustic/ultrasound dual modality imaging aided by acoustic reflectors

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) with a handheld linear ultrasound (US) probe is widely used owing to its convenient and inherent dual modality capability. However, the limited length of the linear probe makes PAI suffer from the limited view. In this study, we present a simple method to substantially increase the view angle aided by two US reflectors. Both phantom and in vivo animal study results have demonstrated that the imaging quality can be greatly improved with the reflector without sacrificing the imaging speed.