What have we done with photoacoustic tomography?
Lihong V. Wang
Wang's laboratory was the first to report functional photoacoustic tomography, 3D photoacoustic microscopy (PAM), photoacoustic endoscopy, photoacoustic reporter gene imaging, the photoacoustic Doppler effect, the universal photoacoustic reconstruction algorithm, microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography, ultrasound-modulated optical tomography, time-reversed ultrasonically encoded (TRUE) optical focusing, nonlinear photoacoustic wavefront shaping (PAWS), compressed ultrafast photography (10 trillion frames/s), Mueller-matrix optical coherence tomography, and optical coherence computed tomography. Wang was the recipient of several award, including NIH's FIRST, NSF's CAREER, NIH Director's Pioneer, and NIH Director's Transformative Research awards. WangWang was conferred with an honorary doctorate from the Lund University, Sweden. Wang also received the OSA C.E.K. Mees Medal "for seminal contributions to photoacoustic tomography and Monte Carlo modeling of photon transport in biological tissues and for leadership in the international biophotonics community". Prof. Wang has been conferred upon by an honorary doctorate degree by Lund University located in Sweden for his contributions towards the field of Biomedical Imaging.
Super-resolution photoacoustic imaging
The key idea is that the sample is pumped with high levels of energy such that all of its electrons are saturated to the excitated state. In this saturated state, the additional energy will be utilized in different ways such as nonlinear thermal expansion. From these pressure waves, images corresponding to the absorption of different molecules can be reconstructed. In Figure 2a and 2b, two 100 nm gold nanoparticles are resolved with super resolution enhanced photoacoustics and verified by atomic force microscopy, a different modality that can break the diffraction limit resolution since it does not rely on light.