Development of Multispectral Optoacoustic Tomography as a Clinically Translatable Modality for Cancer Imaging

Abstract

The use of optoacoustic imaging takes advantage of the photoacoustic effect to generate high-contrast, high-resolution medical images at penetration depths of up to 5 cm. Multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) is a type of optoacoustic imaging system that has seen promising preclinical success with a recent emergence into the clinic. Multiwavelength illumination of tissue allows for the mapping of multiple chromophores, which are generated endogenously or exogenously. However, translation of MSOT to the clinic is still in its preliminary stages. For successful translation, MSOT requires refinement of probes and data-acquisition systems to tailor to the human body, along with more intuitive, real-time visualization settings. The possibilities of optoacoustic imaging, namely MSOT, in the clinic are reviewed here.

Photoacoustic imaging for monitoring of stroke diseases: A review

“…So far, the PAI system has been used for human applications like breast, lymph node, prostate, systemic sclerosis, cardiovascular disease and graves disease [ 118 ]. According to the imaging specificity and depth, PAI is expected to be used for human brain studies.…”

Molecular Imaging of Inflammatory Disease

“…As the clinical translation of NIR fluorescence is limited by low penetration depth, multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT) can overcome those limitations. MSOT imaging is based on a light-in, sound-out approach, having all the benefits of optical imaging but allowing for increased depth penetration, since photon scattering is irrelevant to acoustic waves [112]. Then, NIR-labeled dPGS can be imaged at much greater depths using MSOT [113].…”

“…Many different inflammatory biomarkers are described in this paper; the labeling of these markers with an NIR-sensitive fluorophore will allow for visualization with MSOT. The development of NIR-sensitive, tumor-targeted imaging probes is currently a main focus of MSOT research [112,[163][164][165]. MSOT can differentiate between multiple NIR-sensitive agents through the spectral unmixing of unique spectral shapes.…”

How molecular imaging will enable robotic precision surgery

“…However, molecular imaging has also played an essential role in image-guided surgery, especially using radio-guided surgery. Current intraoperative molecular imaging approaches mainly focus on radioactive, fluorescent, magnetic, or hybrid tracers, but also non-contrasted approaches are flourishing like multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT; [92]), fiber-based microscopy [93], Raman spectrometry [94], among others (Fig. 6).…”

“…Along with improvements of the technology itself, a significant breakthrough was achieved by applying fluorophores to increase tissue contrast in 2012 [ 169 ]. This technique, currently known as multispectral optoacoustic tomography (MSOT), has the main advantage of an improved tissue-penetration (up to 5 cm [ 92 ]) with comparison to fluorescence imaging and the fact that the resulting images are tomographic. Applications have been reported for lymphatic imaging [ 170 ], breast cancer detection [ 171 ], characterization of non-melanoma skin cancers [ 172 ], among others.…”