Isotropic-resolution photoacoustic microscopy with multi-angle illumination.

We have developed photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) with three-dimensional (3D) micron-level spatial resolution. With multi-angle illumination, PAM images from different view angles can be simultaneously acquired for multi-view deconvolution, without the rotation of imaging targets. A side-by-side comparison of this multi-angle-illumination PAM (MAI-PAM) and conventional PAM, which share the same ultrasonic detector, was performed in phantoms and live mice. The phantom study showed that MAI-PAM achieved a high axial resolution of 3.7 μm, which was 10-fold higher than that of conventional PAM and approached the lateral resolution of 2.7 μm. Furthermore, the in vivo study demonstrated that MAI-PAM was able to image the 3D microvasculature with isotropic spatial resolution.