由2千赫兹亚硝酸钡拉曼激光实现的富含脂质动脉粥样硬化斑块的高速血管内光声成像。

Wang Pu, Ma Teng, Slipchenko Mikhail N, Liang Shanshan, Hui Jie, Shung K Kirk, Roy Sukesh, Sturek Michael, Zhou Qifa, Chen Zhongping, Cheng Ji-Xin

Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, 47906, USA.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, NIH Ultrasonic Transducer Resource Center, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA.

Sci Rep. 2014 Nov 4;4:6889. doi: 10.1038/srep06889.

Lipid deposition inside the arterial wall is a key indicator of plaque vulnerability. An intravascular photoacoustic (IVPA) catheter is considered a promising device for quantifying the amount of lipid inside the arterial wall. Thus far, IVPA systems suffered from slow imaging speed (~50 s per frame) due to the lack of a suitable laser source for high-speed excitation of molecular overtone vibrations. Here, we report an improvement in IVPA imaging speed by two orders of magnitude, to 1.0 s per frame, enabled by a custom-built, 2-kHz master oscillator power amplifier (MOPA)-pumped, barium nitrite [Ba(NO3)2] Raman laser. This advancement narrows the gap in translating the IVPA technology to the clinical setting.

动脉壁内的脂质沉积是斑块易损性的关键指标。血管内光声（IVPA）导管被认为是一种用于量化动脉壁内脂质含量的有前景的设备。到目前为止，由于缺乏用于分子泛音振动高速激发的合适激光源，IVPA系统的成像速度较慢（约每秒50帧）。在此，我们报告了通过定制的2 kHz主振荡器功率放大器（MOPA）泵浦的亚硝酸钡[Ba(NO3)2]拉曼激光器，IVPA成像速度提高了两个数量级，达到每秒1.0帧。这一进展缩小了将IVPA技术转化为临床应用的差距。