Lymph nodes play a central role in metastatic cancer spread and are a key clinical assessment target. Abnormal node vascularization, morphology, and size may be indicative of disease but can be difficult to visualize with sufficient accuracy using existing clinical imaging modalities. To explore the potential utility of photoacoustic imaging for the assessment of lymph nodes, images of ex vivo ...

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a hybrid imaging modality where we intend to reconstruct optical properties of heterogeneous media from measured ultrasound signals generated by the photoacoustic effect. In recent years, there have been considerable interests in using PAT to image two-photon absorption, in addition to the usual single-photon absorption, inside diffusive media. We present a mat...

A fast photoacoustic (PA) imaging system, based on a 320-transducer linear array, was developed and tested on a tissue phantom. To reconstruct a test tomographic image, 64 time-domain PA signals were acquired from a tissue phantom with embedded light-absorption targets. A signal acquisition was accomplished by utilizing 11 phase-controlled sub-arrays, each consisting of four transducers. The re...

Measuring distribution of dissolved oxygen in biological tissue is of prime interest for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy optimization. Tumor hypoxia indicates poor prognosis and resistance to radiotherapy. Despite its major clinical significance, no current imaging modality provides direct imaging of tissue oxygen. We present preliminary results demonstrating the potential of photoacou...

We present label-free functional photoacoustic imaging of the ocular microvasculature in living animals. The anterior segment of an adult mouse was imaged with a laser exposure level well within the American National Standards Institute safety standards. Individual red blood cells traveling along the iris capillaries were clearly resolved, and the hemoglobin oxygen saturation in the iris microv...

A novel photoacoustic thermometric method is presented for simultaneously imaging cells and sensing their temperature. With three-seconds-per-frame imaging speed, a temperature resolution of 0.2°C was achieved in a photo-thermal cell heating experiment. Compared to other approaches, the photoacoustic thermometric method has the advantage of not requiring custom-developed temperature-sensitive b...

We build a photoacoustic imaging system using an intensity-modulated continuous-wave laser source, which is an inexpensive, compact, and durable 120-mW laser diode. The goal is to significantly reduce the costs and sizes of photoacoustic imaging systems. By using a bowl-shaped piezoelectric transducer, whose numerical aperture is 0.85 and resonance frequency is 2.45 MHz, we image biological tis...

A photoacoustic imaging system composed of a flexible bundle of thin hollow-optical fibers is proposed for endoscopic diagnosis. In this system, a bundle of 127 hollow-optical fibers with an inner diameter of 100 μm was fabricated. The total diameter of the bundle was 2.1 mm, and the minimum bending radius was around 10 mm. Owing to the small numerical aperture of hollow optical fibers, a high ...

The metabolic rate of oxygen consumption, an important indicator of tissue metabolism, can be expressed as the change of net blood oxygen flux into and out of a tissue region per 100 g of tissue. In this work, we propose a photoacoustic and Doppler ultrasound method for imaging local blood oxygen flux of a single vessel. An imaging system for combined photoacoustic and high-frequency ultrasound...