In vivo whole-body optoacoustic scanner with real-time volumetric imaging capacity

Accurate visualization of biological events occurring on a sub-second scale requires high frame rate acquisition of image data from living tissues. Yet, fast imaging performance commonly comes at the cost of limited field-of-view and reduced image quality. Here, we report on a small-animal optoacoustic tomographic imaging concept based on scanning of a spherical detection array. The suggested approach delivers whole-body images of unparalleled quality while retaining real-time volumetric imaging capability within selected regions at the whole organ scale. Imaging performance was tested in tissue-mimicking phantoms and living animals, attaining nearly isotropic three-dimensional spatial resolution in the range of 250-500 mu m across fields of view covering the entire mouse body. The system maintained high volumetric imaging rates of 100 frames per second within volumes of up to 1.5 cm(3), which further allowed visualizing the fast motion of a beating mouse heart without gating the acquisition. The newly introduced approach is ideally suited for acquisition of both real-time and whole-body volumetric image data, thus offering powerful capacities for simultaneous anatomical, functional, and molecular imaging with optoacoustics. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America