A major difficulty arising from whole-body optoacoustic imaging is the long acquisition times associated with recording signals from multiple spatial projections. The acquired signals are also generally weak and the signal-to-noise-ratio is low, problems often solved by signal averaging, which complicates acquisition and increases acquisition times to an extent that makes many in vivo applications challenging or even impossible. Herein we present a fast acquisition multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) scanner for whole-body visualization of molecular markers in small animals. Multi-wavelength illumination offers the possibility to resolve exogenously administered fluorescent probes, biomarkers, and other intrinsic and exogenous chromophores. The system performance is determined in phantom experiments involving molecular probes and validated by imaging of small animals of various scales.
A method is presented to reduce artefacts produced in optoacoustic tomography images due to internal reflection or scattering of the acoustic waves. It is based on weighting the tomographic contribution of each detector with the probability that a signal affected by acoustic mismatches is measured at that position. The correction method does not require a priori knowledge of the acoustic or optical properties of the imaged sample. Performance tests were made with agar phantoms that included air gaps for mimicking strong acoustic reflections as well as with an acoustically heterogeneous adult Zebrafish. The results obtained with the method proposed show a clear reduction of the artefacts with respect to the original images reconstructed with filtered back-projection algorithm. This performance is directly related to in vivo small animal imaging applications involving imaging in the presence of bones, lungs, and other highly mismatched organs.
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