Urolithiasis is a common urological disease with a very high recurrence rate, within 5 years. Urine stones are formed by urine crystals. Although the relationship between the composition of the urine stone and the type of urine crystal has been recognized, the efficient collection and accurate identification of the type of urine crystal in clinics remains a challenge. In this study, we develop an automatic Raman spectroscopic urine crystal collection and identification system. Custom‐developed Fe3O4 crystal violet nanoclusters are used for (a) separating the urine crystals from the urine samples by a custom‐developed urine processing system and for (b) fluorescent labeling, image guiding, and the Raman spectroscopic measurement of the urine crystals on a 2D scanning stage. The control of the system and the Raman spectroscopic analysis are developed in a LabVIEW environment. This system is a fast and convenient method for the efficient collection and analysis of urinary crystals from urine samples, within 9 min. This automatic urine crystal identification system can enable the early prediction of the types of urine stones and the diet management for urolithiasis patients.
We demonstrate dual modality of free-space fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (FDOT) and handheld ultrasound (US) imaging to reveal both functional and structural information in small animals. FDOT is a noninvasive method for examining the fluorophore inside an object from the light distribution of the surface. In FDOT, a 660-nm continuous wave diode laser was used as an excitation source and an electron-multiplying charge-coupled device (EMCCD) was used for fluorescence data acquisition. Both the laser and EMCCD were mounted on a 360-deg rotation gantry for the transmission optical data collection. The structural information is obtained from a 6-to 17-MHz handheld US linear transducer by single-side access and conducts in the reconstruction as soft priors. The rotation ranges from 0 deg to 360 deg; different rotation degrees, object positions, and parameters were determined for comparison. Both phantom and tissue phantom results demonstrate that fluorophore distribution can be recovered accurately and quantitatively using this imaging system. Finally, an animal study confirms that the system can extract a dual-modality image, validating its feasibility for further in vivo experiments. In all experiments, the error and standard deviation decrease as the rotation degree is increased and the error was reduced to 10% when the rotation degree was increased over 135 deg.
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