Assessment of liver function reserve by photoacoustic tomography: a feasibility study

Abstract

Assessment of liver function reserve (LFR) is essential to determine liver resection scope and predict prognosis for patients with liver disease. Indocyanine green (ICG) concentration change is a classic marker to reflect liver function reserve as ICG is selectively taken up and eliminated by liver. Here we proposed a noninvasive approach for LFR assessment based on a real-time photoacoustic tomography (PAT) system. This feasibility study was to detect ICG concentration change by PAT in phantom and in vivo using both normal and partial hepatectomy (PH) rabbits. A linear relationship between photoacoustic signal intensity of ICG and ICG concentration was found in vitro. In vivo ICG concentration change over time after ICG injection was observed by PAT in normal rabbits, which was consistent with the findings measured by invasive spectrophotometry. Finally, clear difference in ICG clearance between the control and PH models was identified by PAT. Taken together, our study indicated the clinical potential of PAT to in vivo evaluate LFR noninvasively.

Another decade of photoacoustic imaging

“…PAT has been gaining a lot of attention for in vivo small animal studies due to its ability to generate images with high spatial resolution as well as high absorption contrast. Apart from rodent models, PAT has also shown potential in studying diseased rabbits (Qiu et al, 2020). Furthermore, in comparison with CT and MRI, PAT is less expensive and requires less time for imaging.…”

In vivo quantitative photoacoustic evaluation of the liver and kidney pathology in tyrosinemia

“…(2) PAI evaluation of liver and kidney function. Real-time PACT system was proposed to in vivo noninvasively access liver function reserve based on indocyanine green (ICG) concentration change [39] . With the aid of ultra-small black phosphorous quantum dots, PAI was applied to evaluate the clearance function of acute kidney injury and chronic kidney disease, and has higher detection sensitivity than the clinical serum indices examination method [40] .…”

High-Sensitivity Optical-Resolution Photoacoustic Microscopy with an Optical-Acoustic Combiner Based on an Off-Axis Parabolic Acoustic Mirror

“…Moreover, it is unique among optical microscopy technologies for its label-free detection of optical absorption with a relative sensitivity of 100% [14]. Hence, OR-PAM has shown great potentials in various biomedical applications, such as brain imaging [2,5,15,16], breast cancer imaging [3], animal embryo imaging [4,17], cell imaging [18][19][20], and microcirculation imaging [6,[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30].…”