简介: |
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging biomedical imaging technique that can provide high optical contrast and high ultrasound resolution in a single modality. Conventional PAT, however, is qualitative, and images only the absorbed optical energy density which is the product of tissue optical absorption coefficient and optical fluence/photon density. It is known that it is the absorption coefficient that directly correlates with tissue structure and functional/physiological parameters such as blood oxygenation and water content. Quantitative PAT (qPAT) is a recent extension of PAT that can image absolute absorption coefficient and functional parameters. In this talk, I will introduce the basic idea and principle behind qPAT, and present tissue phantom experimental results that validate several reconstruction algorithms for qPAT. I will also describe our most recent pre-clinical and clinical studies aimed at localizing seizure focus, detecting osteoarthritis and imaging whole body of small animals using single- and multi-spectral qPAT. I will conclude this talk with our on-going study based on the idea of combining qPAT and DOT (diffuse optical tomography). |