Simulation on sensitive detection of small absorber in photoacoustic tomography

Noninvasive photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a novel technique with great potential in biomedical image applications for it combines the merits and most compelling features of light and sound, and has the advantages of providing high contrast and high resolution images in moderate depth below the surface. When the image depth is on the scale of centimeter, the millimeter-scale resolution images still can be obtained. Thus it is a powerful tool for the early-stage breast cancer sensing. In this paper, photoacoustic tomography is studied by using the simulation method. The results show that: (1) the contrast of image increases linearly with respect to the number of measurement position (NMP); (2) the contrast increases exponentially with respect to noise-to-signal ratio.