Toward whole-body quantitative photoacoustic tomography of small-animals with multi-angle light-sheet illuminations.

Several attempts to achieve the quantitative photoacoustic tomography (q-PAT) have been investigated using point sources or a single-angle wide-field illumination. However, these schemes normally suffer from low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or poor quantification in imaging applications on large-size domains, due to the limitation of ANSI-safety incidence and incompleteness in the data acquisition. We herein present a q-PAT implementation that uses multi-angle light-sheet illuminations and calibrated recovering-and-averaging iterations. The scheme can obtain more complete information on the intrinsic absorption from the multi-angle illumination mode, and collect SNR-boosted photoacoustic signals in the selected planes from the wide-field light-sheet excitation. Therefore, the sliced absorption maps over whole body of small-animals can be recovered in a measurement-flexible, noise-robust and computation-economic way. The proposed approach is validated by phantom, ex vivo and in vivo experiments, exhibiting promising performances in image fidelity and quantitative accuracy for practical applications.