Arterial Blood‐Mediated Deep‐Tissue Photoacoustic Oximetry

ABSTRACT Photoacoustic tomography is uniquely capable of high‐resolution deep‐tissue blood‐oxygenation (sO ₂ ) imaging (oximetry) due to its optical absorption contrast. However, wavelength‐dependent optical fluence changes within tissue, i.e., spectral coloring, have impeded the development of photoacoustic oximetry. We present the arterial prior method (APM+; + denotes intravascular fluence correction), which leverages the high arterial sO ₂ to locally calibrate the optical fluence within tissue to circumvent spectral coloring and reliably estimate the sO ₂ near the artery. In phantom experiments with ex vivo animal tissue, APM+ resulted in a median estimation error of 2.9% compared to 9.8% from the traditional linear unmixing method (LUM). In human imaging experiments of the radial artery‐vein pair in eight healthy adult volunteers, the estimated venous sO ₂ s from APM+ (median: 72.3%, interquartile range/IQR: 8.9%) were concentrated around the typical 60%–80% range in healthy individuals, whereas those from LUM (median: 75.2%, IQR: 34.4%) varied widely. When imaging the wrists of the eight subjects through ex vivo animal tissue of thicknesses up to 1.5 cm, APM+ provided more consistent estimates than LUM, indicating its robustness with depth.