Chinese University of Science and Technology made progress in biomedical photoacoustic imaging research

[ Instrument R&D of Instrumentation Network ] Recently, Tian Chao’s research group from the Department of Precision Machinery and Precision Instrumentation, University of Science and Technology of China and Anhui Precision Science Instrument Laboratory, conducted noninvasive sentinel lymph node tracing based on photoacoustic imaging, photoacoustic imaging quality improvement and Progress has been made in the research of three-dimensional photoacoustic imaging, and related research results have been published in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Physical Review Applied and Journal of Biophotonics.

Sentinel lymph node biopsy is currently the standard method for breast cancer staging, which includes preoperative lymph node tracing and intraoperative image-guided lymph node biopsy. However, existing imaging technologies have many limitations, such as ionizing radiation, high cost, and poor imaging depth. To address clinical challenges, the study proposed a contrast-enhanced photoacoustic imaging method that uses carbon nanoparticles as a contrast agent to trace sentinel lymph nodes non-invasively and non-radioactively and guide fine needle aspiration biopsies. In the study, living rats were used, and carbon nanoparticles were injected into the forepaws by subcutaneous injection to stain sentinel lymph nodes. Simultaneous photoacoustic and ultrasound dual-mode real-time imaging was performed in the axillary area of ​​rats to trace sentinel lymph nodes and guide biopsy. The figure below shows the entire research process. Experimental results show that photoacoustics can image and display lymph nodes, lymph nodes, needles, etc. with high resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio, which can provide high-quality image guidance for lymph node biopsy. In addition, through spectroscopic analysis, it was found that carbon nanoparticles are superior to indocyanine green, methylene blue and other contrast agents in optical absorption coefficient, photobleaching and photoacoustic conversion efficiency, and are excellent for photoacoustic imaging to identify sentinel lymph nodes and image-guided biopsies. Tracer.

This study provides a practical method for fine needle aspiration biopsy in the sentinel lymph node tracing and image guidance in vivo, and promotes the clinical transformation of photoacoustics. The first author of the paper is Liu Songde, a PhD student of the Chinese University of Science and Technology, and the corresponding author is Tian Chao. The research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Anhui Province and the Chinese University of Science and Technology.