FURI | Fall 2020

Photoacoustic Microscopy with Schlieren Optics to Provide Real-Time Imaging

Wide-field photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) images are challenging to display in real-time because these systems only gather one dimensional depth scans per laser pulse. Reconstructing these images is time consuming since it requires two-dimensional raster scanning. This delay limits both research and clinical applications of PAM. Schlieren optics is a technique that can visualize sound using standard microscope cameras and has the potential to enable full time image capture rather than only one-dimensional depth scans when coupled with PAM. In this work, we aim to use Schlieren optics to effectively reduce PAM reconstruction time to that of the camera frame rate.