ABSTRACT
Exogenous contrast agents in photoacoustic imaging help improve spatial resolution and penetration depth and enable targeted molecular imaging. To screen efficient photoacoustic signaling materials as contrast agents, we propose a light absorption-weighted figure of merit (FOM) that can be calculated using material data from the literature and numerically simulated light absorption cross-sections. The calculated light absorption-weighted FOM shows that a Ti nanodisc has a photoacoustic conversion performance similar to that of an Au nanodisc and better than that of a Pt nanodisc. The photoacoustic imaging results of Ti, Au, and Pt nanodiscs, which are physically synthesized with identical shapes and dimensions, experimentally demonstrated that the Ti nanodisc could be a highly efficient contrast agent.
