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Miniature intravascular photoacoustic endoscopy with coaxial excitation and detection |
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| Authors: | Riqiang Lin Qi Zhang Shengmiao Lv Jiaming Zhang Xiatian Wang Dongliang Shi Xiaojing Gong Kwok-ho Lam |
| Institution: | 1. Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
Research Center for Biomedical Optics and Molecular Imaging, Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Molecular Imaging, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Optical Imaging Technology, CAS Key Laboratory of Health Informatics, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China;2. Department of Electrical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong;3. Research Center for Biomedical Optics and Molecular Imaging, Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Molecular Imaging, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biomedical Optical Imaging Technology, CAS Key Laboratory of Health Informatics, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China |
| Abstract: | Recent research pointed out that the degree of inflammation in the adventitia could correlate with the severity of atherosclerotic plaques. Intravascular photoacoustic endoscopy can provide the information of arterial morphology and plaque composition, and even detecting the inflammation. However, most reported work used a noncoaxial configuration for the photoacoustic catheter design, which formed a limited light-sound overlap area for imaging so as to miss the adventitia information. Here we developed a novel 0.9 mm-diameter intravascular photoacoustic catheter with coaxial excitation and detection to resolve the aforementioned issue. A miniature hollow ultrasound transducer with a 0.18 mm-diameter orifice in the center was successfully fabricated. To show the significance and merits of our design, phantom and ex vivo imaging experiments were conducted on both coaxial and noncoaxial catheters for comparison. The results demonstrated that the coaxial catheter exhibited much better photoacoustic/ultrasound imaging performance from the intima to the adventitia. |
| Keywords: | coaxial catheter ex vivo intravascular photoacoustic endoscopy |