The previous methods to measure flow speed by photoacoustic microscopy solely focused on either the transverse or the axial flow component, which did not reflect absolute flow speed. Here, we present absolute flow speed maps by combining Doppler bandwidth broadening with volumetric photoacoustic microscopy. Photoacoustic Doppler bandwidth broadening and photoacoustic tomographic images were applied to measure the transverse flow component and the Doppler angle, respectively. Phantom experiments quantitatively demonstrated that ranges of 55° to 90° Doppler angle and 0.5 to 10 mm/s flow speed can be measured. This tomography-assisted method provides the foundation for further measurement in vivo.

In this study, the feasibility of visualization of human joints using photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is investigated. To verify this idea, the system of integrated optical fiber bundles and a custom-made flexible transducer is established, both of which give the advantage of morphological adaptation; therefore, the coupling section can be worn on human limbs. The imaging capacity of the flexible-transducer-based PAT system is validated by mapping the structures of the finger and the wrist joint. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time to achieve photoacoustic imaging of such large human wrist joints. The cross-sectional photoacoustic images of a healthy joint clearly exhibit the main internal structures, including the phalanx, tendons, and blood vessels, which are comparable with the corresponding images by 3.0 T magnetic resonance imaging. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system holds promise for early diagnosis of joint disorders.

Photoacoustic (PA) microscopy comes with high potential for human skin imaging, since it allows noninvasively high-resolution imaging of the natural hemoglobin at depths of several millimeters. Here, we developed a PA microscopy to achieve high-resolution, high-contrast, and large field of view imaging of skin. A three-dimensional (3D) depth-coding technology was used to encode the depth information in PA images, which is very intuitive for identifying the depth of blood vessels in a two-dimensional image, and the vascular structure can be analyzed at different depths. Imaging results demonstrate that the 3D depth-coded PA microscopy should be translated from the bench to the bedside.

Photoacoustic imaging (PAI) has been used to characterize the spatial and quantitative features of lipid-rich atherosclerotic plaques with high sensitivity and specificity. In this Letter, we first validate that the ultra-low temperature and formaldehyde treatment have no effect on photoacoustic characteristics of the artery samples. Comparative experiments between the PAI and histological results demonstrate that the ultra-low temperature or formaldehyde treatment has few effects on the PAI of the lipid-rich atherosclerotic plaques; the lipid relative concentration and the lipid percentage by PAI hold high correlation with histology.