Adipocyte property evaluation with photoacoustic spectrum analysis: a feasibility study on human tissues

Abstract

Photoacoustic spectrum analysis (PASA) offers potential advantages in identifying optically absorbing microstructures in biological tissues. Working at high ultrasound frequency, PASA is capable of identifying the morphological features of cells based on their intrinsic optical absorption. Adipocyte size is correlated with metabolic disease risk in the form of diabetes mellitus, thus it can be adopted as a pathology predictor to evaluate the condition of obese patient, and can be helpful for assessing the patient response to bariatric surgery. In order to acquire adipocyte size, usually adipose tissue biopsy is performed and histopathology analysis is conducted. The whole procedure is not well tolerated by patients, and is also labor and cost intensive. An unmet need is to quantify and predict adipocyte size in a mild and more efficient way. This work aims at studying the feasibility to analyze the adipocyte size of human fat tissue using the method of PASA. PA measurements were performed at the optical wavelength of 1210 nm where lipid has strong optical absorption, enabling the study of adipocyte without need of staining. Both simulation and ex vivo experiments have been completed. Good correlation between the quantified photoacoustic spectral parameter slope and the average adipocyte size obtained by the gold-standard histology has been established. This initial study suggests the potential opportunity of applying PASA to future clinical management of obesity.