Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) can image biological tissues at micrometer level resolution. However, the imaging speed of traditional OR-PAM is often too slow for capturing dynamic information. In this work, we demonstrate a high-speed OR-PAM system using a water-immersible two-axis torsion-bending scanner, in which the fast axis employs the torsion scanning while the slow axis works at the bending mode. The system has achieved a cross-sectional frame rate of 400 Hz, and a volumetric imaging speed of 1 Hz over a field of view of 1.5 × 2.5 mm2. We have demonstrated high-speed OR-PAM of fast hemodynamic changes in vivo.
Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) has become a popular tool in small-animal studies. However, previous OR-PAM techniques variously lacked a high imaging speed, a high spatial resolution, and/or a large field of view. Here we report a high-speed OR-PAM system using an innovative water-immersible polygon-mirror scanner, which has achieved a cross-sectional frame rate of as high as 1200 Hz over a 12-mm scanning range. Using this polygon-scanner-based OR-PAM system, we have performed various studies on mouse models with stroke and cardiac arrests. We expect that the new OR-PAM system will become a powerful tool for imaging hemodynamics and neuronal functions.
We report a photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) system using a customized optical fiber with a cylindrical diffuser to internally illuminate deep targets. The traditional external light illumination in PACT usually limits the penetration depth to a few centimeters from the tissue surface, mainly due to strong optical attenuation along the light propagation path from the outside in. By contrast, internal light illumination, with external ultrasound detection, can potentially detect much deeper targets. Different from previous internal illumination PACT implementations using forward-looking optical fibers, our internal-illumination PACT system uses a customized optical fiber with a 3-cm-long conoid needle diffuser attached to the fiber tip, which can homogeneously illuminate the surrounding space and substantially enlarge the field of view. We characterized the internal illumination distribution and PACT system performance. We performed tissue phantom and in vivo animal studies to further demonstrate the superior imaging depth using internal illumination over external illumination. We imaged a 7.5-cm-deep leaf target embedded in optically scattering medium and the beating heart of a mouse overlaid with 3.7-cm-thick chicken tissue. Our results have collectively demonstrated that the internal light illumination combined with external ultrasound detection might be a useful strategy to improve the penetration depth of PACT in imaging deep organs of large animals and humans.
We report a photoacoustic thermal flowmetry based on optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) using a single laser source for both thermal tagging and photoacoustic excitation. When an optically absorbing medium is flowing across the optical focal zone of OR-PAM, a small volume of the medium within the optical focus is repeatedly illuminated and heated by a train of laser pulses with a high repetition rate. The average temperature of the heated volume at each laser pulse is indicated by the photoacoustic signal excited by the same laser pulse due to the well-established linear relationship between the Grueneisen coefficient and the local temperature. The thermal dynamics of the heated medium volume, which are closely related to the flow speed, can therefore be measured from the time course of the detected photoacoustic signals. Here, we have developed a lumped mathematical model to describe the time course of the photoacoustic signals as a function of the medium’s flow speed. We conclude that the rising time constant of the photoacoustic signals is linearly dependent on the flow speed. Thus, the flow speed can be quantified by fitting the measured photoacoustic signals using the derived mathematical model. We first performed proof-of-concept experiments using defibrinated bovine blood flowing in a plastic tube. The experiment results have demonstrated that the proposed method has high accuracy (∼±6%) and a wide range of measurable flow speeds. We further validated the method by measuring the blood flow speeds of the microvasculature in a mouse ear in vivo.
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