A method for the geometric calibration of ultrasound transducer arrays with arbitrary geometries

Karteekeya Sastry; Yang Zhang; Peng Hu; Yilin Luo; Xin Tong; Shuai Na; Lihong V. Wang

Photoacoustics (Aug 2023)

A method for the geometric calibration of ultrasound transducer arrays with arbitrary geometries

Karteekeya Sastry,
Yang Zhang,
Peng Hu,
Yilin Luo,
Xin Tong,
Shuai Na,
Lihong V. Wang

Affiliations

Karteekeya Sastry: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Yang Zhang: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Peng Hu: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Yilin Luo: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Xin Tong: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Shuai Na: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
Lihong V. Wang: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Andrew and Peggy Cherng Department of Medical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA; Corresponding author at: Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA.

Journal volume & issue: Vol. 32
p. 100520

Abstract

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Geometric calibration of ultrasound transducer arrays is critical to optimizing the performance of photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) systems. We present a geometric calibration method that is applicable to a wide range of PACT systems. We obtain the speed of sound and point source locations using surrogate methods, which results in a linear problem in the transducer coordinates. We characterize the estimation error, which informs our choice of the point source arrangement. We demonstrate our method in a three-dimensional PACT system and show that our method improves the contrast-to-noise ratio, the size, and the spread of point source reconstructions by 80±19%, 19±3%, and 7±1%, respectively. We reconstruct the images of a healthy human breast before and after calibration and find that the calibrated image reveals vasculatures that were previously invisible. Our work introduces a method for geometric calibration in PACT and paves the way for improving PACT image quality.

Published in Photoacoustics

ISSN: 2213-5979 (Online)
Publisher: Elsevier
Country of publisher: Netherlands
LCC subjects: Science: Physics: Acoustics. Sound; Science: Physics: Optics. Light
Website: http://www.journals.elsevier.com/photoacoustics/

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