Photoacoustic generation of focused quasi-unipolar pressure pulses

The photoacoustic effect was employed to generate short-duration quasi-unipolar acoustic pressure pulses in both planar and spherically focused geometries. In the focal region, the temporal profile of a pressure pulse can be approximated by the first derivative of the temporal profile near the front transducer surface, with a time-averaged value equal to zero. This approximation agreed with experimental results acquired from photoacoustic transducers with both rigid and free boundaries. For a free boundary, the acoustic pressure in the focal region is equal to the sum of a positive pressure that follows the spatial profile of the optical energy deposition in the medium and a negative pressure that follows the temporal profile of the laser pulse

Simultaneous imaging of a lacZ-marked tumor and microvasculature morphology in vivo by dual-wavelength photoacoustic microscopy

Photoacoustic molecular imaging, combined with the reporter-gene technique, can provide a valuable tool for cancer research. The expression of the lacZ reporter gene can be imaged using photoacoustic imaging following the injection of X-gal, a colorimetric assay for the lacZ-encoded enzyme β-galactosidase. Dual-wavelength photoacoustic microscopy was used to non-invasively image the detailed morphology of a lacZ-marked 9L gliosarcoma and its surrounding microvasculature simultaneously in vivo, with a superior resolution on the order of 10 μm. Tumor-feeding vessels were found, and the expression level of lacZ in tumor was estimated. With future development of new absorption-enhancing reporter-gene systems, we anticipate this strategy can lead to a better understanding of the role of tumor metabolism in cancer initiation, progression, and metastasis, and in its response to therapy

Automatic algorithm for skin profile detection in photoacoustic microscopy

We have developed an automatic algorithm to detect the skin profiles in the volumetric data acquired by photoacoustic microscopy for subcutaneous vasculature imaging. This algorithm analyzes the relationship between amplitudes of photoacoustic signals generated from the skin surface and underlying blood vessels to achieve a rough estimation of the skin profile. A better approximation of the skin profile is then acquired after nonparametric smoothing and Gaussian low-pass spatial filtering. An auto-fit scan mechanism is further developed based on the detected skin profile to achieve good ultrasonic focusing on the subcutaneous vessel layer when the skin contour variation is much larger than the ultrasonic focal zone. The importance of skin profile detection in calculating the maximum-amplitude-projection images and significantly improving the image quality by employing the auto-fit scan are demonstrated by in vivo experimental results

Monte Carlo simulation of light transport in dark-field confocal photoacoustic microscopy

A modified MC convolution method for integration extension of MC simulation is developed for finite photon beam with random shape of translational or rotational invariance, which is proven consistent with the conventional convolution extension of MC simulation for normal incident finite beam. The method is applied to analyze the positions of fluence foci and ratios of fluence at the focus and surface which are two key factors in the application of dark-field confocal and some interesting points are presented including: 1) The fluence profile has a saddle-like shape with highest peak in the bright field and low valley near the surface and a second rise in the center of dark field which is defined as the effective optical focus; 2) Besides a little peak near zero inner radius, the ratio of fluences at the focus and surface increases linearly with the inner radius, suggesting the large inner radius more advantageous to image at the effective optical focus; 3) The position of effective optical foci deepens linearly with the increase of the inner radius, suggesting that to get a high quality image of deeper target, a dark-field with larger size is more beneficial. But the position of fluence foci are far away from the foci of geometrical laser beam in high scattering tissue, so aligning the foci of geometrical laser beam and acoustic transducer doesn't guarantee that effective optical focus is accurately overlapping with the acoustic focus. An MC simulation with integration extension presented in this paper maybe helpful to determine where the acoustic focus should be to maximize the SNR in tissue imaging; 4) incident angle makes little difference to ratio of fluences at the focus and surface and an incident angle between 30 and 50 degrees gives the highest fluence at the effective optical focus; 5) the depth of fluence focus is insensitive to the incident angle

A Counter-Example to the Nichtnegativstellensatz

Klep and Schweighofer asked whether the Nirgendsnegativsemidefinitheitsstellensatz holds for a symmetric noncommutative polynomial whose evaluations at bounded self-adjoint operators on any nontrivial Hilbert space are not negative semidefinite. We provide a counter-example to this open problem

Photoacoustic generation of focused quasi-unipolar pressure pulses

The photoacoustic effect was employed to generate short-duration quasi-unipolar acoustic pressure pulses in both planar and spherically focused geometries. In the focal region, the temporal profile of a pressure pulse can be approximated by the first derivative of the temporal profile near the front transducer surface, with a time-averaged value equal to zero. This approximation agreed with experimental results acquired from photoacoustic transducers with both rigid and free boundaries. For a free boundary, the acoustic pressure in the focal region is equal to the sum of a positive pressure that follows the spatial profile of the optical energy deposition in the medium and a negative pressure that follows the temporal profile of the laser pulse

Modeling relation paths for knowledge base completion via joint adversarial training

Knowledge Base Completion (KBC), which aims at determining the missing relations between entity pairs, has received increasing attention in recent years. Most existing KBC methods focus on either embedding the Knowledge Base (KB) into a specific semantic space or leveraging the joint probability of Random Walks (RWs) on multi-hop paths. Only a few unified models take both semantic and path-related features into consideration with adequacy. In this paper, we propose a novel method to explore the intrinsic relationship between the single relation (i.e. 1-hop path) and multi-hop paths between paired entities. We use Hierarchical Attention Networks (HANs) to select important relations in multi-hop paths and encode them into low-dimensional vectors. By treating relations and multi-hop paths as two different input sources, we use a feature extractor, which is shared by two downstream components (i.e. relation classifier and source discriminator), to capture shared/similar information between them. By joint adversarial training, we encourage our model to extract features from the multi-hop paths which are representative for relation completion. We apply the trained model (except for the source discriminator) to several large-scale KBs for relation completion. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing path information-based approaches. Since each sub-module of our model can be well interpreted, our model can be applied to a large number of relation learning tasks.Comment: Accepted by Knowledge-Based System

Imaging acute thermal burns by photoacoustic microscopy

The clinical significance of a burn depends on the percentage of total body involved and the depth of the burn. Hence a noninvasive method that is able to evaluate burn depth would be of great help in clinical evaluation. To this end, photoacoustic microscopy is used to determine the depth of acute thermal burns by imaging the total hemoglobin concentration in the blood that accumulates along the boundaries of injuries as a result of thermal damage to the vasculature. We induce acute thermal burns in vivo on pig skin with cautery. Photoacoustic images of the burns are acquired after skin excision. In a burn treated at 175°C for 20s, the maximum imaged burn depth is 1.73±0.07mm. In burns treated at 150°C for 5, 10, 20, and 30s, respectively, the trend of increasing maximum burn depth with longer thermal exposure is demonstrated