Photoacoustic systems for biomedical imaging application: A comparison study

Abstract

The primarily aim of this work is to review the recent development of different types of photoacoustic (PA) system to be used as an alternative means of blood flow imaging and biological tissues characterization, and to propose the future of PA imaging system. The advantages and limitations of the recently developed photoacoustic imaging systems in biomedical engineering have yet to be explicitly explored and compared. This paper compared and reported the use and technical aspects of different types of PA imaging commonly employed in clinical diagnosis, which include photoacoustic spectroscopy (PAS), photoacoustic endoscopy (PAE), photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) and photoacoustic tomography (PAT). This work concluded that the capabilities and simplicity of PAS system renders it the optimal technique for non-invasive assessment of the characteristics of tissues in different diseases and in visualization of blood flow; this technology is suitably used in the design and implementation of a handheld medical imaging device in the future to analyze the oxygen saturation of tissues and to predict blood flow rate within microcirculation environment.