Thermoacoustic imaging of liver based on eddy current loss

Abstract

Liver disease causes significant morbidity and mortality worldwide, so it is critical to diagnose and supervise liver disease. Recently, liver imaging plays an important role in non-invasive evaluation of liver disease, because of the limitation of liver biopsy. Here, we demonstrate that thermoacoustic imaging, as a noninvasive imaging method, is able to image liver in vivo. Furthermore, the phenomenon, in which a location wire's eddy current loss will change significantly in different magnetic direction, is used to cross-validate thermoacoustic image of liver. We applied this cross-validation method to rabbit liver imaging experiment in vivo. The results obtained demonstrate that TAI has the potential to provide the function information of liver, hence, become a new diagnosis and follow-up method for liver disease such as fatty liver and hepatic fibrosis