The influence of tissue optical properties on imaging performance of optoacoustic tomography

摘要

Recent progress in optoacoustic tomography has shown its enormous potential in biomedical imaging of biological samples in vivo. The greatest advantage in this imaging modality is that it can offer the imaging contrast comparable to the optical techniques and the imaging resolution similar to the ultrasonic techniques. However, its sectioning capability is largely dependent on the scattering properties of the targeted subject. Therefore, the understanding of how the tissue optical properties affect the imaging performance of optoacoustic tomography would be important. In this paper, we systematically investigate the influence of absorption and scattering coefficients of tissue on the optoacoustic imaging resolution, depth and contrast. In addition, we also investigate the influence of spreading photon diffusion in the tissue on its sectioning capability. In the experiments, tissue phantoms were constructed with a range of optical properties. We used the intralipid solution to control the scattering properties, and the indocynane green to control the absorption property of the phantom. The result shows that the scattering coefficient is a major factor that affects the imaging depth and imaging contrast. It also influences greatly the thickness of tomographic imaging slice due to the light broadening inside tissue caused by the scattering property.