Light and Sound Driven Wavefront Shaping and Imaging through Scattering Tissue

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid imaging method combining photoacoustic and fluorescence techniques with wavefront shaping to achieve high-resolution, deep tissue imaging, overcoming traditional depth-resolution limitations in biological tissues.

Contribution

It presents a novel dual-modal approach that uses hybrid feedback to enable robust wavefront shaping and computational imaging in scattering tissues, integrating photoacoustic and fluorescence signals.

Findings

Successful demonstration of deep tissue focusing with hybrid feedback

Generation of fluorescence via photoacoustic-guided wavefront shaping

Enhanced imaging resolution at greater depths in biological tissues

Abstract

Deep, high-resolution imaging is essential for unraveling biological complexity and advancing medical diagnostics, yet scattering fundamentally limits optical methods. Among the most promising approaches, photoacoustic imaging achieves penetration into deep tissue but with coarse resolution, while fluorescence provides subcellular detail but is confined to shallow depths. This depth-resolution trade-off remains a central barrier to biomedical imaging. To bridge this fundamental gap, we present a hybrid dual-modal strategy that combines the benefits of photoacoustic and fluorescence modalities. Our approach leverages hybrid opto-acoustic feedback for wavefront shaping and computational imaging through scattering media. By combining these complementary signals into a nonlinear feedback metric, we achieve robust optical focusing even under signal degradation. In particular, we show that photoacoustic-guided wavefront shaping inherently generates fluorescence that can be harvested for computational high-resolution imaging even within highly scattering biological tissues, thereby leveraging the complementary strengths of both modalities in a single framework. Proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate this synergistic approach, paving the way for optical imaging techniques that fully leverage the potential of such dual-modalities for large depth penetration and high resolution in complex biological tissues.