Paper
19 February 2018 Light-activated microbubbles around gold nanorods for photoacoustic microsurgery
Lucia Cavigli, Sonia Centi, Sarah Lai, Claudia Borri, Filippo Micheletti, Paolo Tortoli, Ilaria Panettieri, Ingolf Streit, Francesca Rossi, Fulvio Ratto, Roberto Pini
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The increasing interest around imaging and microsurgery techniques based on the photoacoustic effect has boosted active research into the development of exogenous contrast agents that may enhance the potential of this innovative approach.

In this context, plasmonic particles as gold nanorods are achieving resounding interest, owing to their efficiency of photothermal conversion, intense optical absorbance in the near infrared region, inertness in the body and convenience for conjugation with ligands of molecular targets.

On the other hand, the photoinstability of plasmonic particles remains a remarkable obstacle. In particular, gold nanorods easily reshape into nanospheres and so lose their optical absorbance in the near infrared region, under exposure to few-ns-long laser pulses. This issue is attracting much attention and stimulating ad-hoc solutions, such as the addition of rigid shells and the optimization of multiple parameters.

In this contribution, we focus on the influence of the shape of gold nanorods on their photothermal behavior and photostability. We describe the photothermal process in the gold nanorods by modeling their optical absorption and consequent temperature dynamics as a function of their aspect ratio (length / diameter).

Our results suggest that increasing the aspect ratio does probably not limit the photostability of gold nanorods, while shifting the plasmonic peak towards wavelengths around 1100 nm, which hold more technological interest.
© (2018) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Lucia Cavigli, Sonia Centi, Sarah Lai, Claudia Borri, Filippo Micheletti, Paolo Tortoli, Ilaria Panettieri, Ingolf Streit, Francesca Rossi, Fulvio Ratto, and Roberto Pini "Light-activated microbubbles around gold nanorods for photoacoustic microsurgery", Proc. SPIE 10494, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2018, 104942D (19 February 2018); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2289875
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Cited by 1 scholarly publication.
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KEYWORDS
Gold

Nanorods

Particles

Plasmonics

Autoregressive models

Absorption

Photoacoustic spectroscopy

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