Patent ID: 7740585

Claim:
An optoacoustic imaging system for producing images of one or more objects in a body, configured to perform the steps of: a) illuminating a body using pulses of electromagnetic radiation thereby generating a distribution of absorbed thermal energy under conditions of temporal pressure confinement within a volume of a resolution of interest; b) detecting temporally resolved profiles of optoacoustic pressure signals generated within the volume of interest using one or more ultrasonic transducers; c) processing the detected optoacoustic pressure signals to determine a value of absorbed electromagnetic energy; d) determining a probability for each sample of the processed optoacoustic pressure signals to be received from a direction relative to each transducer using a radial backprojection algorithm; and e) applying a maximum angular amplitude probability (MAAP) algorithm effective to use directional information of the received optoacoustic signals relative to the transducer receiving the signal thereby reconstructing the high-contrast optoacoustic images of the body showing location, shape and true brightness of one or more objects within the body, thereby producing high-contrast optoacoustic images of the volume of interest; and f) fitting each reconstructed arc with a polynomial function and calculating the second derivative to determine exact boundaries of one or more objects for quantitative analysis of the reconstructed high-contrast optoacoustic images.