Photoacoustic mesoscopy(PAMe) offers high-sensitivity in vivo imaging based on the rich optical contrast in biological tissues,with sub-100-micron resolutions at a few millimeters depth. By benefiting from low ultrasonic scattering,this emerging technology has pushed the penetration depth beyond the optical diffuse limit unprecedented for high-resolution optical methods.Here,we review ed the state-of-art implementations of PAMe and their achievements in biological and primary clinical applications. With the high-frequency focused ultrasonic detector,the high-resolution optical visualization can be achieved by utilizing various PAMe systems. These capabilities of PAMe have made it well applicable for understanding the biological mechanisms,exploring the pathological features and analyzing the characteristics of human skin. Future improvements and prospects of PAMe are also mentioned,suggesting its great potential tow ards the corresponding emerging biomedical and clinical applications.
The accuracy of the background optical properties has a considerable effect on the quality of reconstructed images in near-infrared functional brain imaging based on continuous wave diffuse optical tomography(CW-DOT). We propose a region stepwise reconstruction method in CW-DOT scheme for reconstructing the background absorption and reduced scattering coefficients of the two-layered slab sample with the known geometric information. According to the relation between the thickness of the top layer and source– detector separation, the conventional measurement data are divided into two groups and are employed to reconstruct the top and bottom background optical properties, respectively. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method can reconstruct the background optical properties of two-layered slab sample effectively. The region-of-interest reconstruction results are better than those of the conventional simultaneous reconstruction method.