Tracking of biodynamics across entire living organisms is essential for understanding complex biology and disease progression. The presently available small‐animal functional and molecular imaging modalities remain constrained by factors including long image acquisition times, low spatial resolution, limited penetration or poor contrast. Here flash scanning volumetric optoacoustic tomography (fSVOT), a new approach for high‐speed imaging of fast kinetics and biodistribution of optical contrast agents in whole mice that simultaneously provides reference images of vascular and organ anatomy with unrivaled fidelity and contrast, is presented. The imaging protocol employs continuous overfly scanning of a spherical matrix array transducer, accomplishing a 200 µm resolution 3D scan of the whole mouse body within 45 s without relying on signal averaging. This corresponds to an imaging speed gain of more than an order of magnitude compared with existing state‐of‐the‐art implementations of comparable resolution performance. Volumetric tracking and quantification of gold nanoagent and near infrared (NIR)‐II dye kinetics and their differential uptake in various organs are demonstrated. fSVOT thus offers unprecedented capabilities for multiscale imaging of pharmacokinetics and biodistribution with high contrast, resolution, and speed.

中文翻译：

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闪光扫描体积光声层析成像技术，用于纳米剂动力学和生物分布的高分辨率全身体跟踪

追踪整个活生物体的生物动力学对于理解复杂的生物学和疾病进展至关重要。目前可用的小动物功能和分子成像方式仍然受到诸多因素的限制，这些因素包括图像采集时间长，空间分辨率低，穿透力有限或对比度差。本文介绍了快速扫描体积光声层析成像（fSVOT），这是一种对整个小鼠进行快速动力学和光学造影剂生物分布的高速成像的新方法，可同时提供具有无与伦比的保真度和对比度的血管和器官解剖学参考图像。该成像协议采用球面矩阵阵列换能器的连续飞越扫描，在不依赖信号平均的情况下，在45 s内完成了整个鼠标体的200 µm分辨率3D扫描。与可比的分辨率性能的现有最先进的实现方式相比，这对应于一个以上数量级的成像速度增益。展示了金纳米剂和近红外（NIR）-II染料动力学及其在不同器官中的差异吸收的体积跟踪和定量。因此，fSVOT具有空前的功能，可以以高对比度，分辨率和速度对药代动力学和生物分布进行多尺度成像。