Adaptive Photoacoustic Sensing Using Matched Filter

Sensitive detection is always crucial to photoacoustic sensing and imaging applications owing to the extremely low conversion efficiency from light to sound. A conventional approach to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the photoacoustic signal is data averaging, which is quite time-consuming due to multiple data acquisitions for each photoacoustic measurement. Especially for a high-power pulsed laser source with only a 10-20 pulse repetition rate, multiple data averaging will severely degrade the frame rate. In this article, we present a simple but efficient method, called adaptive photoacoustic (aPA) sensing, using matched filter to obviously enhance the detected signal SNR with single laser pulse. In vivo experimental results show that the proposed aPA method improved the signal SNR by about 60 dB. It demonstrates the potential of aPA to perform highly sensitive photoacoustic sensing and imaging with accelerated sensing and imaging speed.