Ultrafast acoustoelectric imaging

Imaging the electrical activity of the body is central to the diagnosis of and treatment planning for some of our most pressing healthcare challenges, including heart and brain diseases. The acoustoelectric effect has recently been shown to provide contrast directly from current densities by measuring ultrasound-modulated electrical impedance in the heart. While promising, these approaches, based on focused emission at low frequency, result in limited signal-to-noise ratios (SNR), and temporal and spatial resolutions. In this study, we developed Ultrafast Acoustoelectric Tomography (UAT), based on plane wave emissions, which provides high frame rates and uniformly high spatial and temporal resolutions. We developed a novel reconstruction approach for UAT and demonstrated its feasibility in phantom experiments at current density levels similar to the ones occurring naturally in vivo, indicating that UAT could become a unique technique to map current density distributions in tissues and image their propagation at very high frame rates.