Photoacoustic imaging of microenvironmental changes in facial cupping therapy

Yingying Zhou; Fei Cao; Huanhao Li; Xiazi Huang; Dongshan Wei; Lidai Wang; Puxiang Lai

doi:10.1364/BOE.387985

Photoacoustic imaging of microenvironmental changes in facial cupping therapy

Biomed Opt Express. 2020 Apr 6;11(5):2394-2401. doi: 10.1364/BOE.387985. eCollection 2020 May 1.

Authors

Yingying Zhou^{1

2

3

4}, Fei Cao^{1

3

4}, Huanhao Li^{1

3}, Xiazi Huang^{1

3}, Dongshan Wei⁵, Lidai Wang^{2

6

7}, Puxiang Lai^{1

3

8}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong.
² Department of Biomedical Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong.
³ The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, China.
⁴ These authors contributed equally to this work.
⁵ School of Electrical Engineering and Intelligentization, Dongguan University of Technology, Dongguan, China.
⁶ City University of Hong Kong Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen, China.
⁷ lidawang@cityu.edu.hk.
⁸ puxiang.lai@polyu.edu.hk.

Abstract

As a traditional medicine practice, cupping therapy has been widely used to relieve symptoms like fatigue, tension, and muscle pain. During the therapy, negative pressure is applied to the skin for a while with an intention to enhance blood circulation or induce micro-bleeding. The therapeutic effect, however, is not clear due to the lack of direct quantification. Aiming at a quantitative assessment of the treatment effect, we explore optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) in monitoring the structural and functional changes after cupping. We find that, after 5-minutes of ∼ 20 kPa negative pressure cupping, more capillaries appear in the focus, and micro-blooding is observed from the capillaries. We quantify the images and find the blood vessel density is increased by 64%, and the total hemoglobin concentration in both the veins and the arteries exhibits 62% and 40% elevation, respectively. Oxygen saturation in the vein and artery decreased by 17% and 3% right after cupping, respectively. After two hours of recovery, the three blood-related parameters return to their original levels, indicating that the effects in the tissue last only a short period after cupping at the given pressure and time duration. Note that no significant cupping marks are induced with the treatment parameters in this study. This work proposes OR-PAM to quantitatively monitor and evaluate the effect of cupping therapy from the perspective of imaging. The method is also useful for accurate control of the therapeutic outcome.