Frequency-domain Dual-contrast Photoacoustic Imaging with Chirp Modulation.

Photoacoustic imaging has shown its great potential in biomedical imaging. A variety of imaging applications, like blood oxygenation for functional imaging, have been widely studied during the past few decades. Most of the previous works are based on the tissue's endogenous or nanoprobe's extraneous optical absorbance. In this paper, we proposed frequency-domain dual-contrast photoacoustic imaging aiming at exploring both optical absorption and mechanical property (e.g., viscoelasticity) of tissue. Instead of conventionally used pulsed excitation, a chirp-modulated laser signal is used to excite the sample to induce photoacoustic signals. On one hand, the optical absorption contrast is obtained by cross-correlating the PA signals with the chirp pattern. On the other hand, mechanical property is obtained by performing the Fourier transform to analyze the frequency spectrum. Experimental results revealed that samples with higher density-to-viscoelasticity ratio show larger quality factor in the received PA signals' spectrum. Both theoretical analysis and experimental demonstrations are performed to prove the feasibility of the proposed method.