Photoacoustic tomography of the mouse cerebral cortex with a high-numerical-aperture-based virtual point detector.

The mouse cerebral cortex was imaged in situ by photoacoustic tomography (PAT). Instead of a flat ultrasonic transducer, a virtual point detector based on a high numerical aperture (NA), positively focused transducer was used. This virtual point detector has a wide omnidirectional acceptance angle, a high sensitivity, and a negligible aperture effect. In addition, the virtual point detector can be located much more closely to the object during the detection. Compared with a finite-size flat transducer, images generated by using this virtual point detector have both uniform signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and resolution.