In vivo imaging of small animal models by photoacoustic microscopy

Small animal models, such as zebrafish, drosophila, C. elegan, is considered to be important models in comparative biology and diseases researches. Traditional imaging methods primarily employ several optical microscopic imaging modalities that rely on fluorescence labeling, which may have potential to affect the natural physiological progress. Thus a label-free imaging method is desired. Photoacoustic (PA) microscopy (PAM) is an emerging biomedical imaging method that combines optical contrast with ultrasonic detection, which is highly sensitive to the optical absorption contrast of living tissues, such as pigments, the vasculature and other optically absorbing organs. In this work, we reported the whole body label-free imaging of zebrafish larvae and drosophila pupa by PAM. Based on intrinsic optical absorption contrast, high resolution images of pigments, microvasculature and several other major organs have been obtained in vivo and non-invasively, and compared with their optical counterparts. We demonstrated that PAM has the potential to be a powerful non-invasive imaging method for studying larvae and pupa of various animal models. ? 2012 SPIE.EI