In vivo liver thermoacoustic imaging and demonstration based on localization wire

Abstract

Liver disease causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide. Liver imaging plays an essential role in the noninvasive liver disease evaluation because of the limitation of liver biopsy. This paper aims to image in vivo liver with thermoacoustic imaging (TAI) and demonstrate this liver imaging technique with a cross-validation method. Methods: The imaging system composed of a large aperture antenna and a flexible transducer array was used, and we performed the position calibration using the delay and sum algorithm. The localization wire was utilized in the cross-validation of in vivo liver TAI. Results: We successfully validated in vivo liver TAI. In vivo images of different liver lobes without labels were observed. The imaging depth reached about 4 cm. Conclusions: TAI has the potential to image the liver and provide useful dielectric properties of the liver tissue. This study realized the first in vivo liver TAI, suggesting its prospect in detecting liver disease noninvasively.

First assessment of thermoacoustic tomography for in vivo detection of rheumatoid arthritis in the finger joints

“…[20][21][22][23][24][25][26] With the unique advantages and rapid development, TAT has been thus far applied to detection of breast and prostate cancers, imaging of brain, joints/bone, blood vessels, and liver imaging. [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] For joint imaging, nonionizing TAT can preferably image soft tissue compared with X-ray and CT, which can image bone clearly. And, soft tissue is often easily damaged at an earlier stage for joint diseases.…”

“…In recent years, TAT has been developed in many aspects, such as thermoacoustic mesoscopy, compressive sensing TAT, thermoacoustic endoscopy, multimodality imaging, thermoacoustic molecular imaging, and low‐cost portable TAT systems 20–26 . With the unique advantages and rapid development, TAT has been thus far applied to detection of breast and prostate cancers, imaging of brain, joints/bone, blood vessels, and liver imaging 27–38 . For joint imaging, nonionizing TAT can preferably image soft tissue compared with X‐ray and CT, which can image bone clearly.…”