Author(s): Hengrong Lan, Daohuai Jiang, Feng Gao, Fei Gao
Fig. 1. The overview of the proposed single-channel PACT system. PC: personal computer. Pre-amp: Pre-amplifier.
ABSTRACT
Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) combines the optical contrast of optical imaging and the penetrability of sonography. In this work, we develop a novel PACT system to provide real-time imaging, which is achieved by a 120-elements ultrasound array only using a single data acquisition (DAQ) channel. To reduce the channel number of DAQ, we superimpose 30 nearby channels’ signals together in the analog domain, and shrinking to 4 channels of data (120/30 = 4). Furthermore, a four-to-one delay-line module is designed to combine these four channels’ data into one channel before entering the single-channel DAQ, followed by decoupling the signals after data acquisition. To reconstruct the image from four superimposed 30-channels’ PA signals, we train a dedicated deep learning model to reconstruct the final PA image. In this paper, we present the preliminary results of phantom and in-vivo experiments, which manifests its robust real-time imaging performance. The significance of this novel PACT system is that it dramatically reduces the cost of multi-channel DAQ module (from 120 channels to 1 channel), paving the way to a portable, low-cost and real-time PACT system.
Citation
H. Lan, D. Jiang, F. Gao, and F. Gao, “Deep Learning Enabled Real-Time Photoacoustic Tomography System via Single Data Acquisition Channel,” Photoacoustics, vol. 22, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.pacs.2021.100270.
