For the first time, we have implemented photoacoustic tomography (PAT) to image the water content of an edema in vivo. We produced and imaged a cold-induced cerebral edema transcranially, then obtained blood vessel and water accumulation images at 610 and 975 nm, respectively. We tracked the changes at 12, 24, and 36 h after the cold injury. The blood volume decreased after the cold injury, and the maximum area of edema was observed 24 h after the cold injury. We validated PAT of the water content of the edema through magnetic Resonance Imaging and the water spectrum from the spectrophotometric measurement.
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has been widely used to image optically absorptive objects in both human and animal tissues. For the first time, we present imaging of water with laser-based PAT. We photoacoustically measure the absorption spectra of water-ethanol mixtures at various water concentrations, and then image water-ethanol and pure-water inclusions in gel and a water inclusion in fat tissue. The significant difference in photoacoustic signals between water and fat tissue indicates that the laser-based PAT has the potential to detect water content in tissue.
Speckles have been considered ubiquitous in all scattering-based coherent imaging technologies. However, as an optical-absorption-based coherent imaging technology, photoacoustic (PA) tomography (PAT) suppresses speckles by building up prominent boundary signals. We theoretically study the dependence of PAT speckles on the boundary roughness, which is quantified by the root-mean-squared value and the correlation length of the boundary height. Both the speckle visibility and the correlation coefficient between the reconstructed and actual boundaries are quantified. If the root-mean-squared height fluctuation is much greater than, and the height correlation length is much smaller than the imaging resolution, the reconstructed boundaries become fully developed speckles. In other words, speckle formation requires large uncorrelated height fluctuations within the resolution cell. The first- and second-order statistics of PAT speckles are also studied experimentally. While the amplitude of the speckles follows a Gaussian distribution, the autocorrelation of the speckle patterns tracks that of the system point spread function.
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