Synchronously Amplified Photoacoustic Image Recovery (SAPhIRe)

Aida A Demissie; Donald VanderLaan; Md S Islam; Stanislav Emelianov; Robert M Dickson

doi:10.1016/j.pacs.2020.100198

Synchronously Amplified Photoacoustic Image Recovery (SAPhIRe)

Photoacoustics. 2020 Jul 1:20:100198. doi: 10.1016/j.pacs.2020.100198. eCollection 2020 Dec.

Authors

Aida A Demissie¹, Donald VanderLaan², Md S Islam¹, Stanislav Emelianov^{2

3}, Robert M Dickson¹

Affiliations

¹ School of Chemistry & Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.
² School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.
³ Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.

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.

Keywords: Fluorescence; Imaging; Modulation; Multimodal; Photoacoustics; Signal processing; Spectroscopy.

Grants and funding

R01 EB028916/EB/NIBIB NIH HHS/United States