Impacts of the murine skull on high-frequency transcranial photoacoustic brain imaging.

Non-invasive photoacoustic tomography (PAT) of mouse brains with intact skulls has been a challenge due to the skull's strong acoustic attenuation, aberration, and reverberation, especially in the high-frequency range (>15 MHz). In this paper, we systematically investigated the impacts of the murine skull on the photoacoustic wave propagation and on the PAT image reconstruction. We studied the photoacoustic acoustic wave aberration due to the acoustic impedance mismatch at the skull boundaries and the mode conversion between the longitudinal wave and shear wave. The wave's reverberation within the skull was investigated for both longitudinal and shear modes. In the inverse process, we reconstructed the transcranial photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) and photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) images of a point target enclosed by the mouse skull, showing the skull's different impacts on both modalities. Finally, we experimentally validated the simulations by imaging an in vitro mouse skull phantom using representative transcranial PAM and PACT systems. The experimental results agreed well with the simulations and confirmed the accuracy of our forward and inverse models. We expect that our results will provide better understanding of the impacts of the murine skull on transcranial photoacoustic brain imaging and pave the ways for future technical improvements.

Green's function for anisotropic dispersive poroelastic media based on the Radon transform and eigenvector diagonalization.

A compact Green's function for general dispersive anisotropic poroelastic media in a full-frequency regime is presented for the first time. First, starting in a frequency domain, the anisotropic dispersion is exactly incorporated into the constitutive relationship, thus avoiding fractional derivatives in a time domain. Then, based on the Radon transform, the original three-dimensional differential equation is effectively reduced to a one-dimensional system in space. Furthermore, inspired by the strategy adopted in the characteristic analysis of hyperbolic equations, the eigenvector diagonalization method is applied to decouple the one-dimensional vector problem into several independent scalar equations. Consequently, the fundamental solutions are easily obtained. A further derivation shows that Green's function can be decomposed into circumferential and spherical integrals, corresponding to static and transient responses, respectively. The procedures shown in this study are also compatible with other pertinent multi-physics coupling problems, such as piezoelectric, magneto-electro-elastic and thermo-elastic materials. Finally, the verifications and validations with existing analytical solutions and numerical solvers corroborate the correctness of the proposed Green's function.