Abstract
Optical imaging technologies have enabled outstanding analysis of biomedical tissues through providing detailed functional and morphological contrast. Leveraging the valuable information provided by these modalities can help us build an understanding of tissues’ characteristics. Among various optical imaging technologies, photoacoustic imaging (PAI) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) naturally complement each other in terms of contrast mechanism, penetration depth, and spatial resolution. The rich and unique molecular-specified absorption contrast offered by PAI would be well complemented by detailed scattering information of OCT. Together these two powerful imaging modalities can extract important characteristic of tissue such as depth-dependent scattering profile, volumetric structural information, chromophore concentration, flow velocity, polarization properties, and temperature distribution map. As a result, multimodal PAI-OCT imaging could impact a broad range of clinical and preclinical imaging applications including but not limited to oncology, neurology, dermatology, and ophthalmology. This review provides an overview of the technical specs of existing dual-modal PAI-OCT imaging systems, their applications, limitations, and future directions.
Highlights
The field of medical imaging has continued to grow quickly since the turn of the century, with many new modalities becoming a critical step in a variety of different disease care pathways
The planar-view photoacoustic tomography (PAT) system based on the Fabry–Perot interferometer is of particular interest in most dual-modal PAT-Optical coherence tomography (OCT) applications because of the simplicity of sample positioning and optical detection mechanism [149, 152]
The combination of photoacoustic imaging (PAI) and OCT has drawn a large amount of research interest throughout the past decade
Summary
The field of medical imaging has continued to grow quickly since the turn of the century, with many new modalities becoming a critical step in a variety of different disease care pathways. Another important application for endoscopic PAI-OCT would be intravascular atherosclerotic imaging, where the PAI subsystem could penetrate deep and provide molecular information about the plaque composition and OCT maintains high-resolution, depth-resolved scattering contrast for lipid rich plaques [112]. The temporal resolution of their dual-modal system was limited by the pulse repetition rate of the PAM excitation source (∼1 KHz).
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