Photoacoustic microscopy achieved by microcavity synchronous parallel acquisition technique.

We report on a sub-cellular resolution photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) system that employs microcavity synchronous parallel acquisition technique for detecting the weak photoacoustic (PA) signal excited by a modulated continuous wave (CW) laser source. The gas microcavity transducer is developed based on the fact that the bulk modulus of the gas is far less than the solid and the change of the air-gas pressure is inversely proportional to the gas volume, making it extremely sensitive to the tiny PA pressure wave. Besides, considering PA wave expends in various directions, detecting PA signals from different position and adding them together can increase the detecting sensitivity and the signal to noise ratio(SNR), then we employs two microphone to acquire PA wave synchronously and parallelly. We show that the developed PAM system is capable of label-free imaging and differentiating of the hemoglobin distribution within single red blood cells under normal and anemia conditions.