Compact optical link acquisition for high-speed optoacoustic imaging

Optoacoustic (OA) imaging is gaining popularity in numerous applications such as neuroscience, dermatology, cancer, and cardiovascular research. Current systems often make use of expensive, inflexible, and bulky lasers and data acquisition systems, hindering wide-scale adoption of OA by the biomedical community. Furthermore, the temporal resolution of OA imaging systems is constrained by their data throughput capacity. To address these challenges, we introduce a compact, high-speed, low-cost, and configurable imager based on a novel custom-made optical-link software-defined ultrasound acquisition platform and a fiber-coupled laser diode illumination. The system currently supports simultaneous data acquisition from 192 channels and features two high-bandwidth optical links (100G Ethernet) transmitting data to the host PC. The imaging performance system was first evaluated with experiments in phantoms embedding absorbing microspheres, attaining performance comparable to conventional bulky data acquisition solutions. We further demonstrated an ultrafast in-vivo imaging capability of the new solution by performing fast hand-held scans of the human vasculature. In summary, we developed a new data acquisition concept to enable a new generation of compact and high-performance handheld scanners that can greatly facilitate wider adoption and clinical translation of the OA technology.