Visualization of vasculature using a hand-held photoacoustic probe: phantom and in vivo validation

Validation of photoacoustic/ultrasound dual imaging in evaluating blood oxygen saturation

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) was performed to evaluate oxygen saturation (sO₂) of blood-mimicking phantoms, femoral arteries in beagles, and radial arteries in humans at various sO₂ plateaus. The accuracy (root mean square error, RMSE) of PAI sO₂ compared with reference sO₂ was calculated. In blood-mimicking phantoms, PAI achieved an accuracy of 1.49% and a mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.09% within 25 mm depth, and good linearity (R = 0.968; p < 0.001) was obtained between PAI sO₂ and reference sO₂. In canine femoral arteries, PAI achieved an accuracy of 2.16% and an MAE of 1.58% within 8 mm depth (R = 0.965; p < 0.001). In human radial arteries, PAI achieved an accuracy of 3.97% and an MAE of 3.28% in depth from 4 to 14 mm (R = 0.892; p < 0.001). For PAI sO₂ evaluation at different depths in healthy volunteers, the RMSE accuracy of PAI sO₂ increased from 2.66% to 24.96% with depth increasing from 4 to 14 mm. Through the multiscale method, we confirmed the feasibility of the hand-held photoacoustic/ultrasound (PA/US) in evaluating sO₂. These results demonstrate the potential clinical value of PAI in evaluating blood sO₂. Consequently, protocols for verifying the feasibility of medical devices based on PAI may be established.

Tissue-mimicking phantoms for performance evaluation of photoacoustic microscopy systems

Phantom-based performance test methods are critically needed to support development and clinical translation of emerging photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) devices. While phantoms have been recently developed for macroscopic photoacoustic imaging systems, there is an unmet need for well-characterized tissue-mimicking materials (TMMs) and phantoms suitable for evaluating PAM systems. Our objective was to develop and characterize a suitable dermis-mimicking TMM based on polyacrylamide hydrogels and demonstrate its utility for constructing image quality phantoms. TMM formulations were optically characterized over 400-1100 nm using integrating sphere spectrophotometry and acoustically characterized using a pulse through-transmission method over 8-24 MHz with highly confident extrapolation throughout the usable band of the PAM system. This TMM was used to construct a spatial resolution phantom containing gold nanoparticle point targets and a penetration depth phantom containing slanted tungsten filaments and blood-filled tubes. These phantoms were used to characterize performance of a custom-built PAM system. The TMM was found to be broadly tunable and specific formulations were identified to mimic human dermis at an optical wavelength of 570 nm and acoustic frequencies of 10-50 MHz. Imaging results showed that tungsten filaments yielded 1.1-4.2 times greater apparent maximum imaging depth than blood-filled tubes, which may overestimate real-world performance for vascular imaging applications. Nanoparticles were detectable only to depths of 120-200 µm, which may be due to the relatively weaker absorption of single nanoparticles vs. larger targets containing high concentration of hemoglobin. The developed TMMs and phantoms are useful tools to support PAM device characterization and optimization, streamline regulatory decision-making, and accelerate clinical translation.

Seeing through the Skin: Photoacoustic Tomography of Skin Vasculature and Beyond

Skin diseases are the most common human diseases and manifest in distinct structural and functional changes to skin tissue components such as basal cells, vasculature, and pigmentation. Although biopsy is the standard practice for skin disease diagnosis, it is not sufficient to provide in vivo status of the skin and highly depends on the timing of diagnosis. Noninvasive imaging technologies that can provide structural and functional tissue information in real time would be invaluable for skin disease diagnosis and treatment evaluation. Among the modern medical imaging technologies, photoacoustic (PA) tomography (PAT) shows great promise as an emerging optical imaging modality with high spatial resolution, high imaging speed, deep penetration depth, rich contrast, and inherent sensitivity to functional and molecular information. Over the last decade, PAT has undergone an explosion in technical development and biomedical applications. Particularly, PAT has attracted increasing attention in skin disease diagnosis, providing structural, functional, metabolic, molecular, and histological information. In this concise review, we introduce the principles and imaging capability of various PA skin imaging technologies. We highlight the representative applications in the past decade with a focus on imaging skin vasculature and melanoma. We also envision the critical technical developments necessary to further accelerate the translation of PAT technologies to fundamental skin research and clinical impacts.

Portable and Affordable Light Source-Based Photoacoustic Tomography

Photoacoustic imaging is a hybrid imaging modality that offers the advantages of optical (spectroscopic contrast) and ultrasound imaging (scalable spatial resolution and imaging depth). This promising modality has shown excellent potential in a wide range of preclinical and clinical imaging and sensing applications. Even though photoacoustic imaging technology has matured in research settings, its clinical translation is not happening at the expected pace. One of the main reasons for this is the requirement of bulky and expensive pulsed lasers for excitation. To accelerate the clinical translation of photoacoustic imaging and explore its potential in resource-limited settings, it is of paramount importance to develop portable and affordable light sources that can be used as the excitation light source. In this review, we focus on the following aspects: (1) the basic theory of photoacoustic imaging; (2) inexpensive light sources and different implementations; and (3) important preclinical and clinical applications, demonstrated using affordable light source-based photoacoustics. The main focus will be on laser diodes and light-emitting diodes as they have demonstrated promise in photoacoustic tomography-the key technological developments in these areas will be thoroughly reviewed. We believe that this review will be a useful opus for both the beginners and experts in the field of biomedical photoacoustic imaging.

Toward Wearable Healthcare: A Miniaturized 3D Imager With Coherent Frequency-Domain Photoacoustics

Medical monitoring is undergoing a translation from the hospital-based system to the personalized home-based system. With the aim of wearable application of photoacoustic technique, we propose a miniaturized photoacoustic 3D imager for superficial medical imaging. By employing the compact continuous-wave laser diode based optical irradiation and an ultrathin 2D matrix array based photoacoustic detection in the coherent frequency domain, a wearable imaging probe with a size of about 80 × 25 × 24 mm³ and a weight of 21 g is developed. At the backend, an FPGA controlled Howland current source drives the laser diodes to excite linear frequency modulated optical irradiation. Recorded by a portable multichannel data acquisition system, the generated photoacoustic responses are firstly compressed with the coherent frequency domain photoacoustic method and then extrapolated in the wavenumber-frequency domain for fast image reconstruction. With three-wavelength (450 nm, 638 nm, and 808 nm) laser irradiation, photoacoustic imaging can be operated multispectrally, endowing the developed imager with functional imaging capability in 3D space. With the imager worn on the human forearm, hemoglobin oxygen saturation level in superficial arm vasculature can be long-term monitored with high stability. When the imager is applied for imaging in a relatively large area (e.g., early melanoma detection in the human breast), flexible scanning in a handheld manner can be performed. This work opens the application potential of photoacoustic technique in a broad range of areas, including personalized healthcare, home health monitoring, and long-term physiologic monitoring.

Review of Low-Cost Photoacoustic Sensing and Imaging Based on Laser Diode and Light-Emitting Diode

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT), a promising medical imaging method that combines optical and ultrasound techniques, has been developing for decades mostly in preclinical application. A recent trend is to utilize the economical laser source to develop a low-cost sensing and imaging system, which aims at an affordable solution in clinical application. These low-cost laser sources have different modulation modes such as pulsed modulation, continuous modulation and coded modulation to generate different profiles of PA signals in photoacoustic (PA) imaging. In this paper, we review the recent development of the photoacoustic sensing and imaging based on the economical laser sources such as laser diode (LD) and light-emitting diode (LED) in different kinds of modulation types, and discuss several representative methods to improve the performance of such imaging systems based on low-cost laser sources. Finally, some perspectives regarding the future development of portable PAT systems are discussed, followed by the conclusion.

Multiview Hilbert transformation in full-ring transducer array-based photoacoustic computed tomography

Based on the photoacoustic (PA) effect, PA tomography directly measures specific optical absorption, i.e., absorbed optical energy per unit volume. We recently developed a full-ring ultrasonic transducer array-based photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) system for small-animal whole-body imaging. The system has a full-view detection angle and high in-plane resolution (∼100  μm). However, due to the bandpass frequency response of the piezoelectric transducer elements and the limited elevational detection coverage of the full-ring transducer array, the reconstructed images present bipolar (i.e., both positive and negative) pixel values, which cause ambiguities in image interpretation for physicians and biologists. We propose a multiview Hilbert transformation method to recover the unipolar initial pressure for full-ring PACT. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm was first validated by numerical simulations and then demonstrated with ex vivo mouse brain structural imaging and in vivo mouse whole-body imaging.