Single-walled carbon nanotubes as a multimodal-thermoacoustic and photoacoustic-contrast agent

We have developed a novel carbon nanotube-based contrast agent for both thermoacoustic and photoacoustic tomography. In comparison to deionized water, single-walled carbon nanotubes exhibited more than twofold signal enhancement for thermoacoustic tomography at 3GHz. In comparison to blood, they exhibited more than sixfold signal enhancement for photoacoustic tomography at 1064nm wavelength. The large contrast enhancement of single-walled carbon nanotubes was further corroborated by tissue phantom imaging studies