Quad-mode functional and molecular photoacoustic microscopy

A conventional photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) system typically has to make tradeoffs between its spatial resolution and penetration depth, by choosing a fixed configuration of optical excitation and acoustic detection. The single-scale imaging capability of PAM may limit its applications in biomedical studies. Here, we report a quad-mode photoacoustic microscopy (QM-PAM) system with four complementary spatial resolutions and maximum penetration depths. For this we first developed a ring-shaped focused ultrasound transducer that has two independent elements with respective central frequencies at 20 MHz and 40 MHz, providing complementary acoustically-determined spatial resolutions and penetration depths. To accommodate the dual-element ultrasound transducer, we implemented two optical excitation modes to provide tightly- and weakly-focused light illumination. The dual-element acoustic detection combined with the two optical focusing modes can thus provide four imaging scales in a single imaging device, with consistent contrast mechanisms and co-registered field of views. We have demonstrated the multiscale morphological, functional, and molecular imaging capability of QM-PAM in the mouse head, leg and ear in vivo. We expect the high scale flexibility of QM-PAM will enable broad applications in preclinical studies.