Noncontact Photoacoustic tomography using optical fiber-based heterodyne interferometer

Abstract

We propose the noncontact photoacoustic tomography system that reads the acoustic signal by using an optical fiberbased heterodyne interferometer. The surface displacement of a specimen, resulting from the acoustic wave generated by irradiation of a laser pulse and its absorption inside the specimen, is optically measured by the heterodyne interferometer. With the data set of the surface displacement, the photoacoustic image of the specimen is reconstructed by a Fourier transform based reconstruction algorithm. This proposed method is experimentally evaluated by using a phantom sample that contains PET fibers. © 2014 SPIE.