Abstract
Recent advances in high power, pulsed, light emitting diodes (LEDs) have shown potential as fast, robust and relatively inexpensive excitation sources for photoacoustic imaging (PAI), yet systematic characterization of performance for biomedical imaging is still lacking. We report here technical and biological validation studies of a commercial dual-wavelength LED-based PAI and ultrasound system. Phantoms and small animals were used to assess temporal precision. In phantom studies, we found high temporal stability of the LED-based PAI system, with no significant drift in performance observed during 6 h of operation or over 30 days of repeated measurements. In vivo dual-wavelength imaging was able to map the dynamics of changes in blood oxygenation during oxygen-enhanced imaging and reveal the kinetics of indocyanine green contrast agent inflow after intravenous administration (Tmax∼6 min). Taken together, these studies indicate that LED-based excitation could be promising for future application in functional and molecular PAI.
Highlights
Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is an exciting new modality for mo lecular imaging, which refers to the visualization, characterization and measurement of biological processes at the molecular and cellular levels in living subjects [1]
We found high temporal stability of the light emitting diodes (LEDs)-based photoacoustic imaging (PAI) system, with no significant drift in performance observed during 6 h of operation or over 30 days of repeated mea surements
The temporal stability of the LED-based photoacoustic imaging system for over 180 min in phantoms was found to be excellent: the slopes of the linear fits to the data ac quired over 180 min were not statistically different from zero, indicating negligible system drift (Fig. 2B)
Summary
Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is an exciting new modality for mo lecular imaging, which refers to the visualization, characterization and measurement of biological processes at the molecular and cellular levels in living subjects [1]. Commercial LED-based PAI devices have proven attractive for a range of in vivo molecular imaging applications, from stem cell imaging to evaluation of arthritis, and interventional procedures [18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] Such early promise suggests LED-based PAI has the potential to be adopted as a preclinical and clinical imaging tool, yet systems need to undergo technical and biological validation prior to being used for longitudinal studies in the biomedical setting [28]. Prior work has focused on evaluating the LED beam profile, available resolution and penetration depth for imaging, as well as contrast agent sensitivity but as yet, temporal precision for performing functional and molecular imag ing over time has not been evaluated
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