Abstract

Photoacoustic imaging has developed extensively as a non-invasive and high spatial resolution imaging method for medical diagnosis. In the conventional photoacoustic imaging system, piezoelectric devices have been widely used for ultrasound detection. Although the transducer should be very small in size when implementing it to an endoscopic imaging probe, it is difficult to reduce the size while keeping the sensitivity high. To solve this problem, fiber optic probes equipped with a Fabry-Perot interferometer at the distal end of the fiber have been proposed. [1, 2]. However, this type of fiber-optic probe system usually requires a highly stable and narrow linewidth laser source. This makes it difficult to build a practical endoscopic- imaging system mainly due to the system cost.

© 2013 Japan Society of Applied Physics, Optical Society of America