Clinical photoacoustic/ultrasound dual-modal imaging: Current status and future trends

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality that combines optical and ultrasonic imaging, providing overlapping fields of view. This hybrid approach allows for a natural integration of PAT and ultrasound (US) imaging in a single platform. Due to the similarities in signal acquisition and processing, the combination of PAT and US imaging creates a new hybrid imaging for novel clinical applications. Over the recent years, particular attention is paid to the development of PAT/US dual-modal systems highlighting mutual benefits in clinical cases, with an aim of substantially improving the specificity and sensitivity for diagnosis of diseases. The demonstrated feasibility and accuracy in these efforts open an avenue of translating PAT/US imaging to practical clinical applications. In this review, the current PAT/US dual-modal imaging systems are discussed in detail, and their promising clinical applications are presented and compared systematically. Finally, this review describes the potential impacts of these combined systems in the coming future.