*Article* **Development of Low-Cost Fast Photoacoustic Computed Tomography: System Characterization and Phantom Study**

#### **Mohsin Zafar 1, Karl Kratkiewicz 1, Rayyan Manwar 1 and Mohammad Avanaki 1,2,3,\***



Received: 4 December 2018; Accepted: 12 January 2019; Published: 22 January 2019

**Abstract:** A low-cost Photoacoustic Computed Tomography (PACT) system consisting of 16 single-element transducers has been developed. Our design proposes a fast rotating mechanism of 360◦ rotation around the imaging target, generating comparable images to those produced by large-number-element (e.g., 512, 1024, etc.) ring-array PACT systems. The 2D images with a temporal resolution of 1.5 s and a spatial resolution of 240 μm were achieved. The performance of the proposed system was evaluated by imaging complex phantom. The purpose of the proposed development is to provide researchers a low-cost alternative 2D photoacoustic computed tomography system with comparable resolution to the current high performance expensive ring-array PACT systems.

**Keywords:** Photoacoustic Computed Tomography (PACT); ring array; fast imaging; low cost
