All-optical Photoacoustic and laser-ultrasound imaging of fixed arterial tissue (Conference Presentation)

Arterial tissue imaging and characterization is important for disease diagnosis, treatment planning and monitoring, and research into disease processes. The high optical contrast of photoacoustic imaging can distinguish molecules with unique optical spectra from surrounding arterial tissue, while ultrasound is sensitive to variations in acoustic properties. Combining photoacoustics with ultrasonics provides more comprehensive diagnostic information by extracting molecular information from photoacoustics and structural information from ultrasound. Furthermore, ultrasound may be able to distinguish molecules with indistinct optical spectra but strong acoustic properties, such as calcification. In this work we will present our results applying our recently developed all-optical, multi-channel photoacoustic and laser-ultrasound imaging techniques to arterial tissue ex-vivo. We first apply redatuming techniques to remove reverberation artifacts, and subsequently image with time-reversal.