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. 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. We successfully validated in vivo liver TAI. In vivo images of different liver lobes without labels were observed. The imaging depth reached about 4cm. 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.