2014/10/01 by Ratan K. Saha · 3 citations
Engineering · Medicine · #Photoacoustic and Ultrasonic Imaging #Thermography and Photoacoustic Techniques #Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Techniques
paper · doi:10.1121/1.4894794
A theoretical approach to model photoacoustic (PA) signals from mixtures of melanoma cells (MCs) and red blood cells (RBCs) is discussed. The PA signal from a cell approximated as a fluid sphere was evaluated using a frequency domain method. The tiny signals from individual cells were summed up obtaining the resultant PA signal. The local signal to noise ratio for a MC was about 5.32 and 5.40 for 639 and 822 nm illuminations, respectively. The PA amplitude exhibited a monotonic rise with increasing number of MCs for each incident radiation. The power spectral lines also demonstrated similar variations over a large frequency range (5-200 MHz). For instance, spectral intensity was observed to be 5.5 and 4.0 dB greater at 7.5 MHz for a diseased sample containing 1 MC and 22,952 RBCs than a normal sample composed of 22,958 RBCs at those irradiations, respectively. The envelope histograms generated from PA signals for mixtures of small numbers of MCs and large numbers of RBCs seemed to obey pre-Rayleigh statistics. The generalized gamma distribution found to facilitate better fits to the histograms than the Rayleigh and Nakagami distributions. The model provides a means to study PAs from mixtures of different populations of absorbers.