Continuous acquisition scanner for whole-body multispectral optoacoustic tomography

An essential problem dealing with three-dimensional optoacoustic imaging is the long data acquisition times associated with recording signals from multiple spatial projections, where signal averaging for each projection is applied to obtain satisfying signal-to-noise-ratio. This approach complicates acquisition and makes imaging challenging for most applications, especially for in vivo imaging and multispectral imaging. Instead we employ a herein introduced continuous data acquisition methodology that greatly shortens recording times over multiple projection angles and acquires high quality tomographic data without averaging. By this means a two dimensional image acquisition having 270 angular projections only takes about 9 seconds, while a full multispectral three dimensional image can normally take about 15 minutes to acquire with a single ultrasonic detector. The system performance is verified on tissue-mimicking phantoms containing known concentrations of fluorescent molecular agent as well as small animals.