COMPANY PROFILE TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEW - Photoacoustic Microscopybiompa.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/brochure-2012-03.pdf · COMPANY PROFILE. MicroPhotoAcoustics ... founded in 2010
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COMPANY PROFILEMicroPhotoAcoustics, Inc. (MPA)—a spin-off from Advanced Optowave Coporation—was founded in 2010 with the inventors of three-dimensional photoacoustic microscopy. Multiple patents have been licensed from Dr. Lihong Wang’s lab, Optical Imaging Laboratory at Washington University in St. Louis. MPA provides commerical photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) systems at both optical resolution (OR-PAM) and acoustic resolution (AR-PAM) worldwide.
TECHNOLOGY OVERVIEWPhotoacoustic microscopy is the fastest growing biomedical imaging technology, which affords high-resolution sensing of rich optical contrast in vivo at super-depths—depths beyond the optical transport mean free path (~1 mm in the skin). Although commercially available high-resolution three-dimensional optical imaging modalities—including confocal microscopy, two-photon microscopy and optical coherence tomography—have fundamentally impacted biomedicine, none can reach super-depths in tissue. In PAM, short-pulsed laser light is absorbed by biological tissue and converted to transient heating, which is subsequently converted into an ultrasonic wave due to thermoelastic expansion. Detection of the ultrasonic wave yields a tomographic image. Taking advantage of low ultrasonic scattering, PAM equivalently improves tissue optical transparency by a factor of 1000 and consequently enables super-depth penetration at high resolution. As a unique feature, PAM is exquisitely sensitive to optical absorption, most sensitive among all imaging modalities. PAM enables in vivo imaging of the smallest blood vessels (i.e., capillaries) and single cells with intrinsic tissue contrast (i.e., no exogenous contrast agent injected into the tissue). Both functional and molecular imaging based on optical contrast have been achieved by PAM.