| Abstract: | For the eyeball composed of membrane and liquid, the contrast of ultrasound imaging is not high due to its small variance in acoustic impedance. As a new imaging modality, photoacoustic tomography combines the advantages of pure optical and ultrasonic imaging together and can provide high resolution, high contrast images. In this paper, the feasibility of photoacoustic tomography for ophthalmology is studied experimentally. A Q-switched Nd:YAG pulsed laser with 7-ns pulse width is used to generate photoacoustic signal of a porcine eyeball in vitro. The two-dimensional (2D) optical absorption image of the entire eyeball is reconstructed by time-domain spherical back projection algorithm. The imaging results agree well with the histological structure of the eyeball and show a high imaging contrast. |
