Hand-held 3D Photoacoustic Imaging System with GPS

Photoacoustic imaging (PA) is an emerging imaging technology with various modalities for 2D and 3D imaging in biomedical community. To promote the clinical application of this technology, a 3D photoacoustic tomography (PAT) system that can realize flexible scanning and 3D large FOV imaging is essentially need. In this paper, we developed a 3D PAT system using a hand-held linear ultrasound transducer array combined with a positioning system. The acquired 2D images and location information can be acquired in the real-time and then processed to realize the online 3D imaging using a dedicated 3D reconstruction algorithm. Both the simulation and in-vivo study have been conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed system. The result of 3D PAT imaging on human wrist shows clear outline of the blood vessel with complete structure in 45 mmx38 mmx20 mm volume size, which well proved its feasibility for clinical applications in the future.