A three-dimensional modeling method for quantitative photoacoustic breast imaging with handheld probe

Tao Han; Meng Yang; Fang Yang; Lingyi Zhao; Yuxin Jiang; Changhui Li

doi:10.1016/j.pacs.2020.100222

A three-dimensional modeling method for quantitative photoacoustic breast imaging with handheld probe

Photoacoustics. 2020 Nov 28:21:100222. doi: 10.1016/j.pacs.2020.100222. eCollection 2021 Mar.

Authors

Tao Han¹, Meng Yang², Fang Yang³, Lingyi Zhao¹, Yuxin Jiang², Changhui Li¹

Affiliations

¹ Biomedical Engineering Department, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China.
² Department of Ultrasonography, Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, 100730, China.
³ Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd., Shenzhen, 518057, China.

Abstract

By providing complementary functional information, photoacoustic (PA) breast imaging based on the handheld ultrasound (US) probe has demonstrated promising potential for breast cancer diagnosis. However, the quantitative PA imaging primarily relies on the knowledge of the optical fluence distribution in the three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous breast tissue. Previous studies based on the handheld system generally provided two-dimensional (2D) B-scan results, which contains limited anatomical information of the tissue and the lesion. This study proposed a method to perform 3D modeling of the photon transportation for dual-modality PA/US system based on the local 3D breast anatomical information by scanning US probe. Then the calculated optical fluence distribution can be used for PA imaging. Our phantom and clinical pilot study results demonstrated that this method has potential to improve the accuracy of the quantitative PA breast imaging, and it can also be used in other clinical implementations.

Keywords: Multi-modality imaging; Photoacoustic computed tomography; Quantitative photoacoustic breast imaging; Three dimensional fluence compensation; Ultrasound imaging.