Photoacoustic (PA) imaging is advantageous in contrast agent imaging because of high spatial resolution at depth more than several millimeter inside biological tissues. To detect small tumors specifically, we are developing small organic molecule-based activatable PA probe with mechanism similar to that of the enzyme-activatable fluorescence probe that have successfully used for rapid fluorescence imaging of small tumors. The probe can be imaged also by fluorescence imaging and the fluorescence image can be merged onto the PA images. To extend the imaging depth by increasing PA signal intensity, PA probe that produce PA signals efficiently is required. To select small organic molecules suitable for PA probe, we synthesized small-organic molecule-based contrast agents with various absorption spectra and fluorescence quantum yields and then we exhaustively evaluated their PA signal generation characteristics including PA signal generation efficiencies. To analyze PA signal generation efficiencies precisely, the absolute values of PA signal pressures produced from aqueous solutions of the contrast agents were measured by P(VDF-TrFE) piezoelectric film acoustic sensor. As a result, small organic molecule with low fluorescence quantum yield produced PA signals efficiently. Thus, as opposed to fluorescence probes, PA probes should have low fluorescence quantum yields. By considering the result and other characteristics including excitation wavelengths, we could single out the small organic molecule suitable for PA probe. We synthesized the new activatable PA probe with low fluorescence quantum yield and excitation wavelength longer than 600 nm and its specificity was examined in<i> in vitro </i>experiment.
Multispectral photoacoustic (MS-PA) imaging has been researched to image molecular probes in the presence of strong background signals produced from intrinsic optical absorbers. Spectral fitting method (SFM) discriminates probe signals from background signals by fitting the PA spectra that are calculated from MS-PA images to reference spectra of the probe and background, respectively. Because hemoglobin is a dominant optical absorber in visible to near-infrared wavelength range, absorption spectra of hemoglobin have been widely used as reference background spectra. However, the spectra of background signals produced from heterogeneous biological tissue differ from the reference background spectra due to presence of other intrinsic optical absorbers and effect of optical scattering. Due to the difference, the background signals partly remain in the probe images. To image the probe injected in subcutaneous tumors of mice clearly, we added the melanosome absorption spectrum to the reference background spectra because skin contains nonnegligible concentration of melanosome and the spectrum is very similar to the scattering spectrum of biological tissue. The probe injected in the subcutaneous tumor of mice was an enzyme-activatable probe which show their original colors only in the presence of γ-glutamyltranspeptidase, an enzyme associated with cancer. The probes have been successfully used for rapid fluorescence imaging of cancer. As a result of MS-PA imaging, by considering the melanosome absorption spectrum, the background signals were successfully suppressed and then clearer probe image was obtained. Our MS-PA imaging method afforded successful imaging of tumors in mice injected with activatable PA probes.
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