Optical fluence compensation for handheld photoacoustic probe: An in vivo human study case

Integrating photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound (US) into a handheld probe to perform PA/US dual-modal imaging has been widely studied over the past few years. However, optical fluence decreases quickly in deeper tissue due to light scattering and absorption, which would significantly affect the quantitative PA imaging. In this paper, we performed a fluence compensation for a PA imaging study of human breast. The comparison of PA/US image with and without optical fluence compensation demonstrated that the fluence compensation could effectively improve imaging quality for handheld probe.