Low-cost high-resolution photoacoustic microscopy of blood oxygenation with two laser diodes.

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy (OR-PAM) has been widely used for imaging blood vessel and oxygen saturation of hemoglobin (sO), providing high-resolution functional images of living animals . However, most of them require one or multiple bulky and costly pulsed lasers, hindering their applicability in preclinical and clinical settings. In this paper, we demonstrate a reflection-mode low-cost high-resolution OR-PAM system by using two cost-effective and compact laser diodes (LDs), achieving microvasculature and sO imaging with a high lateral resolution of ∼6 µm. The cost of the excitation sources has dramatically reduced by ∼20-40 times compared to that of the pulsed lasers used in state-of-the-art OR-PAM systems. A blood phantom study was performed to show a determination coefficient of 0.96 in linear regression analysis. Experimental results of mouse ear imaging show that the proposed dual-wavelength LD-based PAM system can provide high-resolution functional images at a low cost.