Three‐dimensional interventional photoacoustic imaging for biopsy needle guidance with a linear array transducer

Abstract

Needle placement is important for many clinical interventions, such as tissue biopsy, regional anesthesia and drug delivery. It is essential to visualize the spatial position of the needle and the target tissue during the interventions using appropriate imaging techniques. Based on the contrast of optical absorption, photoacoustic imaging is well suited for the guidance of interventional procedures. However, conventional photoacoustic imaging typically provides two‐dimensional (2D) slices of the region of interest and could only visualize the needle and the target when they are within the imaging plane of the probe at the same time. This requires great alignment skill and effort. To ease this problem, we developed a 3D interventional photoacoustic imaging technique by fast scanning a linear array ultrasound probe and stitching acquired image slices. in vivo sentinel lymph node biopsy experiment shows that the technique could precisely locate a needle and a sentinel lymph node in a tissue volume while a perfusion experiment demonstrates that the technique could visualize the 3D distribution of injected methylene blue dye underneath the skin at high temporal and spatial resolution. The proposed technique provides a practical way for photoacoustic image‐guided interventions.

Impact of System Factors on the Performance of Photoacoustic Tomography Scanners

“…PAT can visualize biological samples at scales from organelles, cells, tissues, and organs to the small-animal whole body and can reveal multidimensional biological information, such as anatomical, functional, molecular, genetic, and metabolic data [1]. PAT has unique applications in a range of biomedical fields [4,5], such as cell biology [6][7][8][9], neurology [10][11][12], oncology [13,14], rheumatology [15], and ophthalmology [16,17]. Both basic sciences and clinical translations involving PAT are expected to grow in the future.…”

Real-time spectroscopic photoacoustic/ultrasound (PAUS) scanning with simultaneous fluence compensation and motion correction for quantitative molecular imaging

“…In particular, PA spectroscopy has produced functional images in the brain and heart [10,[18][19][20], and molecular images using the unique spectra of nanoengineered contrast agents [16,[20][21][22]. These tools have been extended to clinical breast cancer screening [23][24][25][26], skin lesion diagnosis [27,28], biopsy guidance [29,30], gastrointestinal imaging [31], and tumor metastases and lymph node screening [32].…”

Spatial resolution in photoacoustic computed tomography

“…Currently, there are three major implementations of PA imaging, i.e. photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) [29][30][31], PA microscopy [32][33][34], and PA endoscopy [35,36]. Unlike the other two embodiments, PACT is based on wide-field light illumination and multi-position acoustic detection and its image formation relies on mathematical reconstruction.…”