High-speed dual-view photoacoustic imaging pen.

Today, photoacoustic imaging (PAI) is widely used to study diseases in the skin, brain, cardiovascular, and other parts. However, these studies are often carried out using physiological slices or model animals, which indicate that many PAI techniques can only be used in the laboratory. In order to promote the transformation of PAI into clinical applications or, more specifically, to extend the application of photoacoustic (PA) microscopy to areas such as the oral cavity, throat, cervix, and abdominal viscera which are difficult to detect with conventional PA microscopy systems, a PAI pen was developed. The PAI pen can be handheld and can perform forward detection and lateral detection. The imaging area is a 2.4 mm diameter circular area. In addition, it can provide a high-speed imaging mode of four frames per second and a high-resolution imaging mode of 0.25 frames per second to meet the different needs of clinical users. In this Letter, the performance of the PAI pen was tested by imaging the phantom and the human oral cavity. The experimental results prove that the PAI pen can clearly image the microvessels of the oral cavity, which indicates that it has the same imaging capability for other similar areas and has a good prospect for assisting the diagnosis of related diseases.