  Imaging technologies have been developed to assist physicians and dentist in
the detection of various diseases. Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is a new imaging
technique that shows great promise to image soft tissues. The prototype of PAI
system in this study utilized a non-ionizing 532nm continue-wave diode laser
illumination to image oral soft tissue. The aim of this study was to
investigate the effect of diode laser intensity modulation to the Photoacoustic
image quality. Samples in this study were oral soft tissues from six Sprague
Dawley rats imaged by using the PAI system. To determine the optimum duty cycle
of laser intensity modulation, the laser exposure for oral soft tissue imaging
was set in various duty cycles.
