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http://dx.doi.org/10.7776/ASK.2022.41.5.507

A low noise, wideband signal receiver for photoacoustic microscopy  

Han, Wonkook (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, DGIST)
Moon, Ju-Young (PIE Co., Ltd.)
Park, Sunghun (Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University)
Chang, Jin Ho (Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, DGIST)
Publication Information
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea / v.41, no.5, 2022 , pp. 507-517 More about this Journal
Abstract
The PhotoAcoustic Microscopy (PAM) has been proved to be a useful tool for biological and medical applications due to its high spatial and contrast resolution. PAM is based on transmission of laser pulses and reception of PA signals. Since the strength of PA signals is generally low, not only are high-performance optical and acoustic modules required, but high-performance electronics for imaging are also particularly needed for high-quality PAM imaging. Most PAM systems are implemented with a combination of several pieces of equipment commercially available to receive, amplify, enhance, and digitize PA signals. To this end, PAM systems are inevitably bulky and not optimal because general purpose equipment is used. This paper reports a PA signal receiving system recently developed to attain the capability of improved Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) and Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR) of PAM images; the main module of this system is a low noise, wideband signal receiver that consists of two low-noise amplifiers, two variable gain amplifiers, analog filters, an Analog to Digital Converter (ADC), and control logic. From phantom imaging experiments, it was found that the developed system can improve SNR by 6.7 dB and CNR by 3 dB, compared to a combination of several pieces of commercially available equipment.
Keywords
PhotoAcoustic Microscopy (PAM); Contrast to Noise Ratio (CNR); Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR); Variable gain amplification; Low noise gain amplification;
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