A Photoacoustic Imaging System with Optimized Real-Time Parallel Reconstruction

Biomedical photoacoustic tomography (PAT) provides anatomical, functional, metabolic, molecular, and genetic contrasts of vasculature, hemodynamics, oxygen metabolism, biomarkers, and gene expression. These attributes bring PAT to a wide variety of applications in clinical medicine and preclinical research. We report the development of a real-time PAT imaging system, which integrates signal scanning, image reconstruction and displaying photoacoustic images in real time. An optimized back projection algorithm for PAT imaging is proposed and tested on a latest graphics process unit based card. The whole system is built and tested in an experiment for monitoring moving blood events to validate the real-time performance of this system to image moving events.