Reception pattern influence on magnetoacoustic tomography with magnetic induction

Based on the acoustic radiation theory of a dipole source, the influence of the transducer reception pattern is studied for magnetoacoustic tomography with magnetic induction (MAT-MI). Numerical studies are conducted to simulate acoustic pressures, waveforms, and reconstructed images with unidirectional, omnidirectional, and strong directional transducers. With the analyses of equivalent and projection sources, the influences of the model dimension and the layer effect are qualitatively analyzed to evaluate the performance of MAT-MI. Three-dimensional simulation studies show that the strong directional transducer with a large radius can reduce the influences of equivalent sources, projection sources, and the layer effect effectively, resulting in enhanced pressure and improved image contrast, which is beneficial for boundary pressure extraction in conductivity reconstruction. The reconstructed conductivity contrast images present the conductivity boundaries as stripes with different contrasts and polarities, representing the values and directions of the conductivity changes of the scanned layer. The favorable results provide solid evidence for transducer selection and suggest potential practical applications of MAT-MI in biomedical imaging.