Photoacoustic Analysis Techniques for Thyroid Cancers: Principles and Applications

ABSTRACT

Thyroid cancers are commonly diagnosed worldwide with a continuously increasing incident rate. The ultrasonography is the gold standard method for triaging thyroid nodules to biopsy. Although it has successfully triaged cancerous nodules, many benign nodules also have been triaged to be taken an invasive biopsy, which leads to the overdiagnosing issue. Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging biomedical imaging technique that can provide molecular functional information of biological tissues. Recently, there have been trials to investigate thyroid nodules by using clinically relevant photoacoustic imaging systems. In this review, the principles and applications of the photoacoustic imaging systems for analyzing thyroid nodules are overviewed. Although this technique still has a lot of ways to go for clinical translation, its initial results show great potential to be used for triaging thyroid nodules in vivo.