Performance improvement of magneto-acousto-electrical tomography for biological tissues with sinusoid-Barker coded excitation

By combining magnetics, acoustics and electrics, the magneto-acoustic-electrical tomography (MAET) proves to possess the capability of differentiating electrical impedance variation and thus improving the spatial resolution. However, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the collected MAET signal is still unsatisfactory for biological tissues with low-level electrical conductivity. In this study, the formula of MAET measurement with sinusoid-Barker coded excitation is derived and simplified for a planar piston transducer. Numerical simulations are conducted for a four-layered gel phantom with the 13-bit sinusoid-Barker coded excitation, and the performances of wave packet recovery with side-lobe suppression are improved by using the mismatched compression filter, which is also demonstrated by experimentally measuring a three-layered gel phantom. It is demonstrated that comparing with the single-cycle sinusoidal excitation, the amplitude of the driving signal can be reduced greatly with an SNR enhancement of 10 dB using the 13-bit sinusoid-Barker coded excitation. The amplitude and polarity of the wave packet filtered from the collected MAET signal can be used to achieve the conductivity derivative at the tissue boundary. In this study, we apply the sinusoid-Barker coded modulation method and the mismatched suppression scheme to MAET measurement to ensure the safety for biological tissues with improved SNR and spatial resolution, and suggest the potential applications in biomedical imaging.