Newswise — DURHAM, N.C. — Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a method to scan and image the blood flow and oxygen levels inside a mouse brain in real-time with enough resolution to view the activity of both individual vessels and the entire brain at once.
This new imaging approach breaks long-standing speed and resolution barriers in brain imaging technologies and could uncover new insights into neurovascular diseases like stroke, dementia and even acute brain injury.
The research appeared May 17 in the Nature journal Light: Science & Applications.
Imaging the brain is a balancing act. Tools need to be fast enough to capture rapid events, like a neuron firing or blood flowing through a capillary, and they need to show activity at different scales, whether it’s across the entire brain or at the level of a single artery.
“You can achieve these things individually, but it’s very difficult to do them all together,” said Junjie Yao, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. “It’s like choosing between having a fast car that is small and uncomfortable to sit in, or a large, spacious car that doesn’t go over 30 miles an hour. For a long time, there wasn’t a way to get everything you wanted at once.”
In their new study, Yao and his team discuss how they’ve solved this long-standing trade-off by developing ultrafast photoacoustic microscopy, or UFF-PAM.
Photoacoustic microscopy uses the properties of light and sound to capture detailed images of organs, tissues and cells throughout the body. The technique uses a laser to send light into a targeted tissue or cell. When the laser hits the cell, it heats up and expands instantaneously, creating an ultrasonic wave that travels back to a sensor.
UFF-PAM relies on a combination of hardware advancements and machine learning algorithms to upgrade the technique. On the hardware side, a polygon scanning system sends more laser bursts to a larger area while a new scanning mechanism allows the laser scanner and ultrasound sensor to operate at the same time. According to Yao, these changes doubled the speed of their device, making UFF-PAM the fastest imaging technology in the photoacoustic community.
