This study explores a novel approach to detect virus-laden droplets in the ambient air. An air-coupled photoacoustic (PA) technique is considered for this purpose. The free space PA system is developed using an air-coupled transducer with a center frequency of 350 kHz and a nanosecond pulsed laser operating at wavelength 533 nm. Water droplets containing 80 nm gold (Au) nanoparticles were aerosolized using a custom-built spraying system. The size of the droplets generated was in the range of a few hundred nanometers to 100 μm. Au nanoparticles of four concentrations (0, 8x10-12, 16x10-12, and 32x10-12 mol/L) were sprayed into the investigation domain interrogated by a laser beam, where the average PA signal from the droplets was 3.11±2.35, 1.28±1.26, 0.99±0.97, and 0.92±1.11 mV/mJ, respectively. The study showed, surprisingly, that water droplets without Au nanoparticles had a higher PA signal than those containing Au nanoparticles. A numerical analysis using a finite difference time domain method was used to explore the reasons for this unexpected finding. Results suggested that the undoped droplets could potentially focus the light, significantly increasing the fluence at the focus. When Au nanoparticles were present, the fluence within the droplet decreased, resulting in a lower PA signal.
KEYWORDS: Protactinium, Oxygen, Blood, In vivo imaging, Arteries, Blood circulation, Photoacoustic spectroscopy, Hemodynamics, In vitro testing, Imaging systems
Significance: We demonstrate the potential of probing the sO2 change under blood flow in vivo using photoacoustic (PA) imaging and sheds light on the complex relationship between RBC aggregation and oxygen delivery.
Aim: To conduct in vivo assessments of the sO2 in the radial artery of healthy volunteers and simultaneously probe the relation between the sO2 and hemodynamic behavior such as red blood cell (RBC) aggregation.
Approach: The effects of PA-based measurements of blood hemodynamics were studied as a function of the subjects’ age (20s, 30s, and 40s). The pulsatile blood flow in the human radial artery of 12 healthy subjects was imaged in the 700 to 900 nm optical wavelength range using a linear array-based PA system.
Results: The PA power when blood velocity is minimum (Pamax) was larger than the one attained at maximum blood velocity (Pamin), consistent with predictions based on the cyclical variation of RBC aggregation during pulsatile flow. The difference between Pamin and Pamax at 800 nm (ΔPa800) increased with age (1.7, 2.2, and 2.6 dB for age group of 20s, 30s, and 40s, respectively). The sO2 computed from Pamax was larger than the one from Pamin.
Conclusions: The ΔPa800 increased with participant age. The ΔPa800 metric could be a surrogate of noninvasively monitoring the age-induced changes in RBC aggregation. The sO2 change during a cycle of pulsatile blood flow also increased with age, demonstrating that RBC aggregation can affect the sO2 change.
In this work, speckle in acoustic-resolution photoacoustic (PA) imaging systems is discussed. Simulations and experiments were used to demonstrate that PA speckle carries structural information related to sub-resolution absorbers.
Numerical simulations of phantoms containing spherical absorbers were performed using Green’s function solutions to the PA wave equation. A 21 MHz linear array was simulated (256 elements, 75×165 µm resolution, bandwidth 9-33 MHz) and used to record, bandlimit and beamform the generated PA signals. The effects of absorber size (10-270 µm) and concentration (10-1000/mm3) on PA speckle were examined using envelope statistics and radiofrequency spectroscopy techniques. To examine PA speckle experimentally, a VevoLAZR system was used to image gelatin phantoms containing 3 and 15µm polystyrene beads, a tissue mimicking radial artery phantom, and murine tumour vasculature in vivo.
Fully developed speckle, as assessed by Rayleigh distribution fits to PA signal envelopes, was present in all images (simulated and experimental) containing at least 10 absorbers per resolution volume, irrespective of absorber size. Changes in absorber size could be detected using the spectral slope of the normalized power spectrum (4.5x decrease for an 80 µm increase in size). PA images of flowing blood in the radial artery phantom also revealed the presence of speckle with intensity that fluctuated periodically with beat rate (4 dB per cycle). Speckle was ubiquitous to all murine tumor vasculature images. During treatment-induced vascular hemorrhaging, the spectral slope decreases by 80% compared to untreated mice. These results demonstrate that photoacoustic speckle encodes information about the underlying absorber distribution.
In the present paper, the optical wavelength dependence on the photoacoustic (PA) assessment of the pulsatile blood flow was investigated by means of the experimental and theoretical approaches analyzing PA radiofrequency spectral parameters such as the spectral slope (SS) and mid-band fit (MBF). For the experimental approach, the pulsatile flow of human whole blood at 60 bpm was imaged using the VevoLAZR system (40-MHz-linear-array probe, 700-900 nm illuminations). For the theoretical approach, a Monte Carlo simulation for the light transmit into a layered tissue phantom and a Green’s function based method for the PA wave generation was implemented for illumination wavelengths of 700, 750, 800, 850 and 900 nm. The SS and MBF for the experimental results were compared to theoretical ones as a function of the illumination wavelength. The MBF increased with the optical wavelength in both theory and experiments. This was expected because the MBF is representative of the PA magnitude, and the PA signal from red blood cell (RBC) is dependent on the molar extinction coefficient of oxyhemoglobin. On the other hand, the SS decreased with the wavelength, even though the RBC size (absorber size which is related to the SS) cannot depend on the illumination wavelength. This conflicting result can be interpreted by means of the changes of the fluence pattern for different illumination wavelengths. The SS decrease with the increasing illumination wavelength should be further investigated.
This paper attempts to experimentally and analytically quantify the aggregation-induced changes in the photoacoustic amplitude (PAA) by simultaneously examining the effect of red blood cell (RBC) aggregate size and optical illumination wavelength. In experiments, the pulsatile flow of human whole blood at 60 bpm was imaged using the VevoLAZR system equipped with a 40-MHz-linear-array probe. The samples were illuminated every 10 nm from 700 to 900 nm. For the analytical model, the PAA from both a collection of randomly distributed RBCs of 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, and 30 cells and a single absorber as a spherical aggregate of RBCs formed by the corresponding number of RBCs. The oxygen saturation (sO2) was measured as 74% and 80% for the non-aggregated RBCs and the RBC aggregation. These values were assigned to the analytical RBC aggregates containing between 5 and 30 cells. The normalized PAA (nPAA) for the experimental results was compared to that generated by the theoretical calculations. At a given wavelength, the analytical nPAA for the collection of RBCs were identical for all numbers of RBCs, but that for the RBC aggregate increased with the number of RBCs forming the aggregate due to the increase in the effective photoacoustic absorber size. The experimental as well as analytical nPAA for both RBC aggregation and non-aggregation increased with the wavelength at a given absorber size. This was due to the fact that the PAA is mainly determined by the optical absorption coefficient (μa) which increases due to the relationship between εHbO and wavelength. In addition, the difference of PAA between RBC aggregation and nonaggregation also increased with the wavelength due to the increase in the μa induced by the hypothesized enhanced sO2 resulting from the increased size of RBC aggregates. These results can be used as a means of estimating the oxygen loading and unloading during blood flow. This investigation elucidates the quantitative relationship between the RBC aggregate size and the optical illumination wavelength for probing the physiology of flowing blood.
In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of high-frequency photoacoustic (PA) imaging to study the shear rate dependent relationship between red blood cell (RBC) aggregation and oxygen saturation (SO2) in a simulated blood flow system. The PA signal amplitude increased during the formation of aggregates and cyclically varied at intervals corresponding to the beat rate (30, 60, 120, 180 and 240 bpm) for all optical wavelengths of illumination (750 and 850 nm).The SO2 also cyclically varied in phase with the PA signal amplitude for all beat rates. In addition, the mean blood flow velocity cyclically varied at the same interval of beat rate, and the shear rate (i.e. the radial gradient of flow velocity) also cyclically varied. On the other hand, the phase of the cyclic variation in the shear rate was reversed compared to that in the PA signal amplitude. This study indicates that RBC aggregation induced by periodic changes in the shear rate can be correlated with the SO2 under pulsatile blood flow. Furthermore, PA imaging of flowing blood may be capable of providing a new biomarker for the clinical application in terms of monitoring blood viscosity, oxygen delivery and their correlation.
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