The excellent medical research resources and expertise of Jürgen Czarske, TU Dresden, and Wengfeng Xia, King’s, are brought together in this new collaboration that aims to further develop cancer diagnostics through photoacoustic imaging.
Photoacoustic microscopy is an emerging imaging method based local heating due to light absorption in tissue. It has the potential to enable label free cancer diagnosis given sufficient spatial resolution is achieved. To realise deep tissue diagnostics with minimal invasive keyhole access, in this project, the collaborating researchers will develop a miniaturised sub-millimeter fibre-optic endomicroscopy probe based on optical excitation of ultrasound with sub-micrometer resolution. Raster scanning is employed for spatially selective excitation. The system will be combined with sensitive acoustic detectors, which will enable to map spatial optical absorbance of the specimen. The optical sub-system will be setup and tested at TU Dresden. The acoustical sub-system will be setup and tested at King’s. Validation will take place in London. The research group plans to establish a long-term cooperation with internationalisation of research and education. The leverage of the research towards biomedical applications in the clinic is pursued.