Dextran-coated Fe3O4magnetic nanoparticles as a contrast agent in thermoacoustic tomography for hepatocellular carcinoma detection

Medical Imaging Technology and Imaging Agents

Medical imaging is a technology that studies the interaction between human body and irradiations of X-ray, ultrasound, magnetic field, etc. and represents anatomical structures of human organs/tissues with the implication of irradiation attenuation in the form of grayscales. With these medical images, detailed information on health status and disease diagnosis may be judged by clinical physicians to determine an appropriate therapy approach. This chapter will give a systematic introduction on the modalities, classifications, basic principles, and biomedical applications of traditional medical imaging along with the types, construction, and major features of the corresponding contrast agents or imaging probes.

In vivo liver thermoacoustic imaging and demonstration based on localization wire

PURPOSE

Liver disease causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Liver imaging plays an essential role in the noninvasive liver disease evaluation because of the limitation of liver biopsy. This paper aims to image in vivo liver with thermoacoustic imaging (TAI) and demonstrate this liver imaging technique with a cross-validation method.

METHODS

The imaging system composed of a large aperture antenna and a flexible transducer array was used, and we performed the position calibration using the delay and sum algorithm. The localization wire was utilized in the cross-validation of in vivo liver TAI.

RESULTS

We successfully validated in vivo liver TAI. In vivo images of different liver lobes without labels were observed. The imaging depth reached about 4 cm.

CONCLUSIONS

TAI has the potential to image the liver and provide useful dielectric properties of the liver tissue. This study realized the first in vivo liver TAI, suggesting its prospect in detecting liver disease noninvasively.