Synchronously Amplified Photoacoustic Image Recovery (SAPhIRe)

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Aida A. Demissie, Georgia Institute of Technology; Donald VanderLaan, Georgia Institute of Technology; Md S. Islam, Georgia Institute of Technology; Stanislav Emelianov, Emory University; Robert M. Dickson, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Language: English
• Date: 2020-12-01
• Publisher: Elsevier GmbH
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2020 The Authors.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pacs.2020.100198
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: Photoacoustics
• Volume: 20
• Start Page: 100198
• End Page: 100198
• Grant/Funding Information: The work was supported in part by the Vasser WoolleyFoundation, National Institutes of Health under grants CA158598 andEB028916, and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation under grantBCRF-19-043.
• Keywords: Microscopy; Radiology, Nuclear Medicine & Medical Imaging; Tomography; Spectroscopy; Imaging; Technology; Signal processing; Engineering, Biomedical; Modulation; Acoustics; Life Sciences & Biomedicine; Science & Technology; Sentinel Lymph-nodes; Vivo; Engineering; Instruments & Instrumentation; Agents; Multimodal; Walled Nanotubes; Fluorophores; Photoacoustics; Fluorescence
• Research Categories: Chemistry, Biochemistry; Engineering, Biomedical; Physics, Acoustics

Abstract

In molecular and cellular photoacoustic imaging with exogenous contrast agents, image contrast is plagued by background resulting from endogenous absorbers in tissue. By using optically modulatable nanoparticles, we develop ultra-sensitive photoacoustic imaging by rejecting endogenous background signals and drastically improving signal contrast through time-delayed pump-probe pulsed laser illumination. Gated by prior pump excitation, modulatable photoacoustic (mPA) signals are recovered from unmodulatable background through simple, real-time image processing to yield background-free photoacoustic signal recovery within tissue mimicking phantoms and from ex-vivo tissues. Inherently multimodal, the fluorescence and mPA sensitivity improvements demonstrate the promise of Synchronously Amplified Photoacoustic Image Recovery (SAPhIRe) for PA imaging in diagnosis and therapy.