Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Photoacoustic and ultrasound
imaging with nanosized
contrast agents
Mansik Jeon and Chulhong Kim
Departments of Electrical Engineering and Creative IT Engineering, Pohang University
of Science and Technology, Pohang, Republic of Korea
10.1
introduction
Molecular imaging has attracted great attention in biomedicine in the last few decades
as a valuable tool for personalized medicine. Existing pure optical molecular imaging
modalities, such as confocal microscopy [1-5], two-photon microscopy [6-9],
optical coherence tomography [10-16], and fluorescence (FL) tomography [17-21],
have had a great impact on preclinical and clinical research. However, the intrinsic
optical opaqueness of biological tissues prevents these modalities from maintaining
high spatial resolution beyond the one optical transport mean free path (~1 mm) [22].
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) has been in the spotlight during the last decade
because PAT overcomes limitations of commercially available optical and ultrasound
(US) imaging modalities and shows great promises in molecular imaging. PAT, a
hybrid imaging modality by taking advantages of strong optical contrast and high
ultrasonic resolution, was developed to overcome the fundamental impediments of
existing techniques [23-27]. At the same time, the contrast agents for PAT have been
heavily investigated to improve the sensitivity and specificity of molecular PAT. In
this chapter, we will mainly discuss principles of photoacoustic (PA) imaging with a
short overview of nanosized PA contrast agents.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search