A Low-Cost Compressive Thermoacoustic Tomography System for Hot and Cold Foreign Bodies Detection

Microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography (MITAT) is suitable for detecting foreign bodies (FBs) in human body due to the sufficient microwave contrast between the FBs and surrounding human tissues. But detection of both hot and cold FBs by the same modality has not been demonstrated. In addition, traditional widely used imaging algorithms for MITAT requires highly intensive measurements, which is not cost-effective or time-efficient. This work reports the application of a low-cost compressive thermoacoustic tomography (CTAT) system for the detection of both hot and cold FBs embedded in tissues, referred to as FBD. We give detailed description of the theory of MITAT and CTAT. We show experimental demonstrations using different shaped metallic samples as the hot FBs and glass and wood samples as the cold FBs. We achieve successful detection of all the hot and cold FBs embedded in different tissues. The CTAT-FBD method is a new paradigm promising for a bunch of diagnosis or sensing applications. It is also possible to build a portable system for this technique.