Experimental study of pulsed ultrasono-optical tomography

Abstract

We present a phantom study of NIR tomographic imaging based on the pulsed-ultrasound modulation of diffuse light in turbid media. The bottleneck of the method is the very low S/N which cannot be overcome by the conventional signal-averaging because of the slowly-varying light phase on the detector. We proposed a simple model for the detected signal and validated it experimentally. Furthermore, we proposed the frequency-doubling-and-averaging method to recover the signal, and demonstrated its feasibility through the phantom experiment.