The aim of this study was to investigate the PA signal generated from gold nanorods (GNRs) loaded in custom made phantoms. VevoLAZR (VisualSonics Inc., Toronto) was used with custom made agar phantom, with 5 parallel polyethylene tubes (with 0.58mm internal and 0.99mm external diameter), and a PDMS phantom, with six parallel channels with sizes from 50 μm to 500 μm, loaded with two different types of GNRs: PEGGNRs (53nm length and 11nm axial diameter, plasmon resonance at 840nm, 87nM (15mM Au equivalent)); and gold nanorods (NPZ) coated in a dense layer of hydrophilic polymers by Nanopartz Inc., Loveland, CO (41nm length and 10nm axial diameter, plasmon resonance at 808nm, 83 nM (14mM Au equivalent)). The absorption spectra acquired with the PA system and the spectrophotometer were compared. The reproducibility and stability of the PA signal were evaluated at different dilutions. The dynamic variation of the PA signal was evaluated as function of the number of the GNRs. The SNR and the contrast were measured across the range of concentrations studied. The custom made agar phantom demonstrated suitable for the characterization of PA contrast agents such as PEG-GNRs and NPZ. The PDMS phantom is promising in the field of photoacoustics, therefore future works will conducted exploiting its precise and controlled geometry. |
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CITATIONS
Cited by 2 scholarly publications.
Gold
Nanorods
Nanoparticles
Absorption
Photoacoustic spectroscopy
Signal to noise ratio
Photoacoustic imaging