Acoustic resolution photoacoustic microscopy (ARPAM) combines the advantages of high optical contrast, and high ultrasonic spatial resolution and penetration. However, in photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), the information from deep regions can be greatly affected by the shallow targets, and most importantly, the irreconcilable conflict between the lateral resolution and depth of fields has always be a major factor that limits the imaging quality. In this work, an ARPAM system was developed, in which a non-coaxial arrangement of light illumination and acoustic detection was adopted to alleviate the influence of the tissue surface on the deep targets, and a novel focal zone integral algorithm was applied with multiple axial scanning to improve the lateral resolution. Phantom experiment results show that, the build system can maintain a consistent high lateral resolution of 0.6 mm over a large range in axial direction, which is close to the theoretical calculations. The following tumor imaging results on nude mice indicate that, the proposed method can provide more in-depth information compared with the conventional back detection ARPAM method. With the development of fast repetition lasers and image scanning technologies, the proposed method may play an important role in cerebral vascular imaging, cervical cancer photoacoustic endoscopic detection, and superficial tumor imaging.
光声显微成像兼具高光学组织对比度，以及超声的高穿透深度和高空间分辨率的优点。但一方面在光声显微成像中，组织深层目标易被浅表目标屏蔽，另一方面其横向分辨率与焦深的矛盾一直限制了光声显微的成像质量。针对这两个问题，本实验搭建了一套基于超声分辨的光声显微成像系统。其采用一种非共轴的照明-探测方式来减少浅层组织对深层信息的影响，并且采用一种新的焦区积分算法来进行数据的处理，结合多次纵向变焦扫描来实现深层组织的高分辨探测。仿体实验表明，该方法可以在不同纵向深度上保持约 0.6 mm 的横向分辨率，与理论值相接近。裸鼠肿瘤成像结果表明，本文所提出的方法可以比普通的背向探测声聚焦光声显微成像方法在深度方向上获取更多的信息。随着超快脉冲激光和高速扫描方式的发展，本文所提出的方法有望在脑部血管成像、宫颈癌内窥成像、浅表肿瘤成像等方面得到较好的应用。.
Keywords: acoustic resolution photoacoustic microscopy; focal zone integral; lateral resolution; tumor imaging.