The UltraVision supports attachment to a Laser system for synchronization and acquisition of photoacoustic images in real time.

The UltraVision stores all the analog to digital converter’s RF data in buffers in the FPGA which are then processed by the beamformer. In photoacoustics mode, once these buffers are filled with the RF data from a laser flash, they are beamformed multiple times with different coefficients to form each acoustic line. The process takes 100 microseconds to beamform an acoustic line thus a 128 acoustic line image can be formed in 13 milliseconds. The usual lasers used on photoacoustics can be fired only once every 100 milliseconds so the remaining time is usually used to form several ultrasound images of the same field of view. The live image streams of photoacoustics and ultrasound are displayed and can be recorded. Time can also be used to download the RF data of the photoacoustic images for later back-projection algorithms implemented in the PC.

Image streams may also be separated if spectroscopic laser imaging is used.