Frequency Domain Analysis of Multiwavelength Photoacoustic Signals for Differentiating Tissue Components

The feasibility of differentiating tissue components by performing frequency domain analysis of photoacoustic images acquired at different wavelengths was studied in this paper. Firstly, according to the basic theory of photoacoustic imaging, a brief theoretical model for frequency domain analysis of multiwavelength photoacoustic signal was deduced. The experiment results proved that the performance of different targets in frequency domain is quite different. Especially, the acoustic spectrum characteristic peaks of different targets are unique, which are 2.93 MHz, 5.37 MHz, 6.83 MHz, and 8.78 MHz for PDMS phantom, while 13.20 MHz, 16.60 MHz, 26.86 MHz, and 29.30 MHz for pork fat. The results indicated that the acoustic spectrum of photoacoustic imaging signals is possible to be utilized for tissue composition characterization.