Imaging and Analytics

Photoacoustic microscopy uses confocal optical excitation and ultrasound acquisition to non-invasively generate high-resolution images of optical absorption from subsurface tissue. I introduced transparent ultrasound transducers which replaced transcranial window, typically mounted on mouse skull for optical imaging, to enable multimodal brain imaging along with neural stimulation. This instrument will shed new light on our understanding of mechanism behind ultrasonic neural stimulation and accompanying brain hemodynamics. The figure above shows the results from our initial demonstration of the concept: (a) shows the schematic of the imaging setup; (b) is a picture of a chicken embryo used as imaging target; (c) shows the optical absorption map of the imaged region; and (d) shows the transparent ultrasound transducer mounted on a live mouse skull for simultaneous stimulation and 2-photon imaging. Please check the publications below for more details about this research.

• Patent: A. Dangi, S. Agrawal, and S. R. Kothapalli, Translucent ultrasound transducers for photoacoustic imaging, US patent application no. PCT/US20/17793 dated 11-Feb-2020
• Chen, H., Agrawal, S., Dangi, A., Wible, C., Osman, M., Abune, L., … Kothapalli, S. R. (2019). Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy using transparent ultrasound transducer. Sensors, 19(24), 5470. https://doi.org/10.3390/s19245470.
• Dangi, A., Agrawal, S., & Kothapalli, S.-R. (2019). Lithium niobate-based transparent ultrasound transducers for photoacoustic imaging. Optics Letters, 44(21), 5326. https://doi.org/10.1364/ol.44.005326

• Dangi, A., Cheng, C., Agrawal, S., Tiwari, S., Datta, G. R., Benoit, R., … Kothapalli, S.-R. (2019). A Photoacoustic Imaging Device using Piezoelectric Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers (PMUTs). IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, 1–1. https://doi.org/10.1109/tuffc.2019.2956463