title: Photoacoustic tomography through a whole adult human skull with a photon recycler.
abstract: ABSTRACT. Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) of the human brain is challenging due to the fact that the skull strongly absorbs and scatters light, and attenuates and distorts ultrasound as well. For the first time, we demonstrated the feasibility of PAT through a whole adult human skull. A photon recycler (PR) was built to increase light transmittance through the skull. Both a graphite target and a canine brain were imaged through the skull. Use of the PR was found to improve the photoacoustic signal-to-noise ratio by a factor of 2.4. In addition, subtraction of photoacoustic signals that arise from light absorption within the skull significantly improved the contrast of the target. Our results indicate that PAT can potentially be applied to in vivo human brain imaging.
authors.affiliation: Washington University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA.
authors.forename: Liming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Nie
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Cai
authors.forename: Konstantin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Maslov
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Garcia-Uribe
authors.forename: Mark A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Anastasio
authors.forename: Lihong V
authors.initials: LV
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D000818:Animals; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D004285:Dogs; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D059906:Neuroimaging / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D055620:Optical Phenomena; D061088:Photoacoustic Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D017785:Photons; D012542:Scattering, Radiation; D012886:Skull / Q000033:anatomy & histology*; D041622:Tomography, Optical / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*