摘要
Objective and Impact Statement.Simultaneous imaging of ultrasound and optical contrasts can help map structural,functional,and molecular biomarkers inside living subjects with high spatial resolution.There is a need to develop a platform to facilitate this multimodal imaging capability to improve diagnostic sensitivity and specificity.Introduction.Currently,combining ultrasound,photoacoustic,and optical imaging modalities is challenging because conventional ultrasound transducer arrays are optically opaque.As a result,complex geometries are used to coalign both optical and ultrasound waves in the same field of view.Methods.One elegant solution is to make the ultrasound transducer transparent to light.Here,we demonstrate a novel transparent ultrasound transducer(TUT)linear array fabricated using a transparent lithium niobate piezoelectric material for real-time multimodal imaging.Results.The TUT-array consists of 64 elements and centered at~6 MHz frequency.We demonstrate a quad-mode ultrasound,Doppler ultrasound,photoacoustic,and fluorescence imaging in real-time using the TUT-array directly coupled to the tissue mimicking phantoms.Conclusion.The TUT-array successfully showed a multimodal imaging capability and has potential applications in diagnosing cancer,neurological,and vascular diseases,including image-guided endoscopy and wearable imaging.
基金
funded by the Penn State Cancer Institute—Highmark Seed Grant (SRK)
College of Engineering Multidisciplinary Grant,and Grace Woodward Grant (SRK).
