By providing complementary functional information, photoacoustic (PA) breast imaging based on the handheld ultrasound (US) probe has demonstrated promising potential for breast cancer diagnosis. However, the quantitative PA imaging primarily relies on the knowledge of the optical fluence distribution in the three-dimensional (3D) heterogeneous breast tissue. Previous studies based on the handheld system generally provided two-dimensional (2D) B-scan results, which contains limited anatomical information of the tissue and the lesion. This study proposed a method to perform 3D modeling of the photon transportation for dual-modality PA/US system based on the local 3D breast anatomical information by scanning US probe. Then the calculated optical fluence distribution can be used for PA imaging. Our phantom and clinical pilot study results demonstrated that this method has potential to improve the accuracy of the quantitative PA breast imaging, and it can also be used in other clinical implementations.

通过提供补充的功能信息，基于手持式超声（US）探头的光声（PA）乳房成像已显示出可用于乳腺癌诊断的潜力。但是，定量PA成像主要依赖于三维（3D）异质乳房组织中的光学注量分布的知识。先前基于手持式系统的研究通常提供二维（2D）B扫描结果，其中包含组织和病变的有限解剖信息。这项研究提出了一种方法，通过扫描US探头，基于局部3D乳房解剖信息，对双模态PA / US系统进行光子传输的3D建模。然后，可以将计算出的光通量分布用于PA成像。