Whole-body multispectral photoacoustic imaging of adult zebrafish.

The zebrafish, an ideal vertebrate for studying developmental biology and genetics, is increasingly being used to understand human diseases, due to its high similarity to the human genome and its optical transparency during embryonic stages. Once the zebrafish has fully developed, especially wild-type breeds, conventional optical imaging techniques have difficulty in imaging the internal organs and structures with sufficient resolution and penetration depth. Even with established mutant lines that remain transparent throughout their life cycle, it is still challenging for purely optical imaging modalities to visualize the organs of juvenile and adult zebrafish at a micro-scale spatial resolution. In this work, we developed a non-invasive three-dimensional photoacoustic imaging platform with an optimized illumination pattern and a cylindrical-scanning-based data collection system to image entire zebrafish with micro-scale resolutions of 80 μm and 600 μm in the lateral and axial directions, respectively. In addition, we employed a multispectral strategy that utilized excitation wavelengths from 690 nm to 930 nm to statistically quantify the relative optical absorption spectrum of major organs.