No abstract

The challenge in photothermal therapy (PTT) is to develop biocompatible photothermal transducers that can absorb and convert near-infrared (NIR) light into heat with high efficiency. Herein, we report salt-induced aggregation of gold nanoparticles (GNPs) in biological media to form highly efficient and biocompatible NIR photothermal transducers for PTT and photothermal/photoacoustic (PT/PA) imaging of cancer. The GNP depots in situ formed by salt-induced aggregation of GNPs show strong NIR absorption induced by plasmonic coupling between adjacent GNPs and very high photothermal conversion efficiency (52%), enabling photothermal destruction of tumor cells. More interestingly, GNPs in situ aggregate in tumors to form GNP depots, enabling simultaneous PT/PA imaging and PTT of the tumors. These findings may provide a simple and effective way to develop a new class of intelligent and biocompatible NIR photothermal transducers with high efficiency for PT/PA imaging and PTT.

Recently, there has been great interest in the integration of dispersed generation units at the distribution level. This requires new analysis tools for understanding system performance. This paper presents an adaptive distributed power flow solution method based on the compensation-based method. The comprehensive distributed system model includes 3-phase nonlinear loads, lines, capacitors, transformers, and dispersed generation units. The numerical properties of the compensation-based power flow method are compared and analyzed under different situations, such as load unbalance, sudden increase of 1-phase loads, degree of meshed loops, number of generator nodes, and so on. Based on these analyses, an adaptive compensation-based power flow method is proposed that is fast and reliable while maintaining necessary accuracy. It is illustrated that this adaptive method is especially appropriate for simulation of slow dynamics.

Photoacoustic imaging and fluorescence molecular imaging are emerging as important research tools for biomedical studies. Photoacoustic imaging offers both strong optical absorption contrast and high ultrasonic resolution, and fluorescence molecular imaging provides excellent superficial resolution, high sensitivity, high throughput, and the ability for real-time imaging. Therefore, combining the imaging information of both modalities can provide comprehensive in vivo physiological and pathological information. However, currently there are limited probes available that can realize both fluorescence and photoacoustic imaging, and advanced biomedical applications for applying this dual-modality imaging approach remain underexplored. In this study, we developed a dual-modality photoacoustic-fluorescence imaging nanoprobe, ICG-loaded Au@SiO2, which was uniquely designed, consisting of gold nanorod cores and indocyanine green with silica shell spacer layers to overcome fluorophore quenching. This nanoprobe was examined by both PAI and FMI for in vivo imaging on tumor and ischemia mouse models. Our results demonstrated that the nanoparticles can specifically accumulate at the tumor and ischemic areas and be detected by both imaging modalities. Moreover, this dual-modality imaging strategy exhibited superior advantages for a precise diagnosis in different scenarios. The new nanoprobe with the dual-modality imaging approach holds great potential for diagnosis and stage classification of tumor and ischemia related diseases.