Acoustic and photoacoustic scattering from transverse isotropic tissues
Journal
SPIE Photonics West 2013
Date Issued
2013-02
Author(s)
Abstract
This research investigated anisotropic scattering of ultrasonic and photoacoustic waves from tissues consisting of transverse isotropic structures. Anisotropic scattering refers to the systematic variation in acoustic scattered energy. Take tendon as an example, the maximum occurs when the arrangement of the transducer and fiber orientation is perpendicular and minimum occurs when the arrangement is parallel. Experimental results indicate the apparent integrated backscatter (AIB), which is widely adopted to compute the scattered energy, for photoacoustic as well as ultrasonic waves decayed as the arrangement changed from perpendicular to parallel. The AIB decrement using transducers with center frequency of 3.5 MHz, 5 MHz, and 20 MHz were 10.50 dB, 18.01 dB, and 20.98 dB, respectively. Photoacoustic AIB decrement detected by transducers with center frequency of 3.5 MHz, 5 MHz, and 20 MHz were 7.63 dB, 15.54 dB, and 17.76 dB, respectively. It is shown that higher detection frequency resulted in a larger decrement. A hypothesis is proposed to explain why photoacoustic waves are less affected by the fibrous tissue. In ultrasonic scattering, incident direction for each scatterer were similar due to the relatively planar wavefront, hence the signal amplitudes scattered at the transducer direction are also similar. In photoacoustic scattering, the spherical-like wavefront causes different incident directions for different scatterers, therefore the variation of the signal amplitude collected by the transducer increases, resulting in a lower correlation with the microstructure. In addition, the decrement of backscattered energy decreased for a single scatterer when the incident wave was spherical. Experimental and simulation results verified the hypothesis. The discovery implies that photoacoustic imaging has the potential to detect tissues with transverse isotropic structure that may be overlooked by conventional ultrasound imaging.
SDGs
Type
conference paper