• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.33 no.5
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• pp.300-308
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• 2014

Photoacoustic imaging is a useful tool for the diagnosis of atherosclerosis because it is capable of providing anatomical and pathological information at the same time. A photoacoustic signal detector is a pivotal element to achieve high spatial resolution, so that it should have broadband spectrum with a high center frequency. Since a photoacoustic imaging probe is directly inserted into blood vessel to diagnose atherosclerosis, the total size of the photoacoustic signal detector should be less than 1 mm. The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that PVDF can be used as an active material for the photoacoustic signal detector with a high frequency and broadband characteristic. The photoacoustic signal detector developed in this study was a single element ultrasound transducer with an aperture of $0.5{\times}0.5mm$ and the total size of 1 mm. In the design stage, the natural focal depth was adjusted for an effective focal area to cover the region of interest, i.e., 1~5 mm in depth. This was because geometrical focusing could not be used due to the small aperture. Through a pulse-echo test, it was ascertained that the developed photoacoustic signal detector has the -6 dB bandwidth ranging between 40.1 and 112.8 MHz and the center frequency of 76.83 MHz.