Low Temperature-Mediated Enhancement of Photoacoustic Imaging Depth

Sadreddin Mahmoodkalayeh; Hossein Z Jooya; Ali Hariri; Yang Zhou; Qiuyun Xu; Mohammad A Ansari; Mohammad R N Avanaki

doi:10.1038/s41598-018-22898-2

Low Temperature-Mediated Enhancement of Photoacoustic Imaging Depth

Sci Rep. 2018 Mar 20;8(1):4873. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-22898-2.

Authors

Sadreddin Mahmoodkalayeh^{1

2

3}, Hossein Z Jooya⁴, Ali Hariri¹, Yang Zhou¹, Qiuyun Xu¹, Mohammad A Ansari³, Mohammad R N Avanaki^{5

6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA.
² Department of Physics, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
³ Laser and Plasma Research Institute, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran.
⁴ Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Department of Biomedical Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA. mrn.avanaki@wayne.edu.
⁶ Department of Dermatology, Wayne State University School of Medicine, Detroit, Michigan, USA. mrn.avanaki@wayne.edu.
⁷ Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute, Detroit, Michigan, USA. mrn.avanaki@wayne.edu.

Abstract

We study the temperature dependence of the underlying mechanisms related to the signal strength and imaging depth in photoacoustic imaging. The presented theoretical and experimental results indicate that imaging depth can be improved by lowering the temperature of the intermediate medium that the laser passes through to reach the imaging target. We discuss the temperature dependency of optical and acoustic properties of the intermediate medium and their changes due to cooling. We demonstrate that the SNR improvement of the photoacoustic signal is mainly due to the reduction of Grüneisen parameter of the intermediate medium which leads to a lower level of background noise. These findings may open new possibilities toward the application of biomedical laser refrigeration.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't