Ultrasonic (US) imager for enhanced resolution, contrast and fast patient screening via co-registration with photoacoustic-radar tomographic (PART) imaging of breast cancer

要求生物医学超声（US）成像仪作为我们实验室开发的独特光声雷达断层成像仪（PART）的附件，并与之集成和配准（或共同成像）。PART成像仪在频域中工作，它使用电流调制半导体激光源和基于雷达（或声纳）原理检测的换能器相控阵列。PART软件可同时生成振幅和相位图像。两种成像模式的拟议组合（PART - US）用于早期乳腺癌诊断应用的成像在许多重要方面上级单独的PART成像和单独的US成像：1）常规超声是成熟的技术，并且共配准可以极大地促进我们的新颖PART成像模态到商业系统中的集成，其中光声和超声激励源将使用相同的超声接收器阵列; 2）超声通道可以用于生物组织目标的快速筛选和识别，因此为实时PART US临床成像铺平了道路; 3）通过突出血液的存在，共同配准的叠加图像可以表现出上级特异性（在血管生成肿瘤的情况下），以便在由于周围解剖结构处的声散射体和边界反射而单独通过每种模态获得的其他对比的且可能混淆的杂散信号中更好地可视化肿瘤形态和位置; 4）利用我们系统中正在开发的双波长PART源，在两个近红外波长处的图像的相对幅度强度将用于评估超声描绘的肿瘤的血氧程度，从而建立恶性/良性肿瘤诊断标准。

A biomedical ultrasonic (US) imager is requested as an accessory to, and for integration and co-registration (or co-imaging) with, a unique photoacoustic-radar tomography (PART) imager developed in our laboratory. The PART imager operates in the frequency domain, it uses current-modulated semiconductor laser sources and a transducer phased array with detection based on radar (or sonar) principles. PART software produces simultaneous amplitude and phase images. The proposed combination of the two imaging modalities (PART - US) for early breast cancer diagnostic applications will be superior to PART imaging alone and to US imaging alone on many important counts: 1) Conventional ultrasound is a mature technology and co-registration can greatly facilitate the integration of our novel PART imaging modality into a commercial system, where photoacoustic and ultrasonic excitation sources will be using the same ultrasonic receiver array; 2) the ultrasound channel can be used for quick screening and identification of biological tissue targets therefore paving the way for real-time PART - US clinical imaging; 3) the co-registered superposition image can exhibit superior specificity by highlighting the presence of blood (in the case of angiogenetic tumors) for better visualization of tumor morphology and location among other contrasting - and possibly confusing- stray signals obtained by each modality alone due to acoustic scatterers and boundary reflections at the surrounding anatomy; 4) using a two-wavelength PART source under development in our system, the relative amplitude strengths of images at the two near-infrared wavelengths will be used to assess the degree of blood oxygenation of ultrasonically delineated tumors, thereby establishing a malignant / benign tumor diagnosis criterion.