This summer, at the IV All-Russian Acoustics Conference, held jointly with the XXXVIII Session of the Russian Scientific and Technical Acoustics Society, in Nizhny Novgorod, the LIMU team had the opportunity to visit the Laboratory of Ultrasound and Optoacoustic Diagnostics at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, led by Pavel V. Subochev.
Our colleagues demonstrated the devices for optoacoustic angiography they had developed that can be used to “hear” a blood flow map using optoacoustic visualization.
The method is based on the broadband recording of ultrasound waves generated by chromophores in biological tissue when they absorb probing optical pulses. In blood, such chromophore is hemoglobin. When exposed to laser light, red blood cells heat up by fractions of a degree and expand, subsequently emitting an acoustic pulse in the ultrasonic range. To receive these pulses emitted by blood cells and reconstruct a 3D blood flow map in real time, the colleagues developed a highly sensitive multi-element array consisting of 512 hydrophones based on a piezoelectric polymer film.
In clinical practice, optoacoustic angiography methods are used to assess vascularization in oncology, monitor tumor response to therapeutic interventions, study subcutaneous melanin-containing tumors and atherosclerotic changes in vessel walls, as well as to analyze age-related pathologies in ophthalmology and hemodynamic responses of the brain.
You can learn more about our colleagues’ work in a recently published interview in Scientific Russia and on the BARI-NN team website.
We wish our colleagues new scientific discoveries and, of course, look forward to future meetings and joint research!