An improved ultrasound field simulation of photoacoustic tomography

Simulation of the ultrasound field in photoacoustic tomography (PAT) plays an important role in the study of PAT. The validity of theories can be verified through the simulation without the cost of many experiments, and it is convenient to adjust parameters when the experiment conditions change. In this paper, an improved method is proposed to exactly simulate the ultrasound field. The time-of-flight method and the finite-difference time-domain method are firstly utilized to solve the wave equation of PAT. Then simulated signals with these two methods are combined to get a more accurate solution, which takes the advantage of each method. With the given energy absorption of the biological tissue, the relative photoacoustic signals can be generated by this proposed method. It is shown from simulation experiments that the proposed method is capable of decreasing calculation errors and saving the simulation time.