Quantification of optical attenuation coefficient based on continuous wavelet transform of photoacoustic signals measured by a focused broadband acoustic sensor

We proposed a method of quantifying the effective attenuation coefficients of optical absorbers which uses the continuous wavelet transform to calculate the time-resolved frequency spectra of photoacoustic (PA) signals. In order to apply the method to blood oxygenation monitoring of blood vessels, this study discusses how to reduce the effects of blood vessel diameters, which influences on the time resolved frequency spectra of PA signals. Numerical simulations which calculate the PA signals produced from blood vessel phantoms with various diameters were performed. The simulations revealed that the frequency of PA signal became independent from the vessel diameters by measuring the PA signal from small area. The frequencies of simulated PA signals were proportional to the effective attenuation coefficients with a correlation coefficient of 0.99, and a slope of 0.035 MHz/cm(-1) under condition that the measurement area was 4.0 mm at a frequency of 1.5 MHz. Thus we used the focused acoustic sensor of which focusing the foregoing measurement area. It consisted of a P(VDF-TrFE) film, which was characterized by broad frequency band. As results of experiments using the focused acoustic sensor, the frequencies of PA signals produced from blood vessel phantoms were proportional to the effective attenuation coefficients with correlation coefficient of 0.96 although the frequencies were suffered from deviations of 0.135 MHz, which corresponded to the effective attenuation coefficient of 3.46 cm(-1). Since the large deviations were caused by experimental factors such as sensor alignment, it is required to improve robustness to the experimental factors.