Photo-acoustic imaging, also known as opto-acoustic imaging, has become a widely popular modality for biomedical applications. This hybrid technique possesses the advantages of high optical contrast and high ultrasonic resolution. Due to the distinct optical absorption properties of tissue compartments and main chromophores, photo-acoustics is able to non-invasively observe structural and functional variations within biological tissues including oxygenation and deoxygenation, blood vessels and spatial melanin distribution. The detection of acoustic waves produced by a pulsed laser source yields a high scaling range, from organ level photo-acoustic tomography to sub-cellular or even molecular imaging. This review discusses significant novel technical solutions utilising photo-acoustics and their applications in the fields of biomedicine and life sciences.

The development of new medical-monitoring applications requires precise modeling of effects on the human body as well as the simulation and the emulation of realistic scenarios and conditions. The first aim of this paper is to develop realistic and adjustable 3D human-body emulation platforms that could be used for evaluating emerging microwave-based medical monitoring/sensing applications such as the detection of brain tumors, strokes, and breast cancers, as well as for capsule endoscopy studies. New phantom recipes are developed for microwave ranges for phantom molds with realistic shapes. The second aim is to validate the feasibility and reliability of using the phantoms for practical scenarios with electromagnetic simulations using tissue-layer models and biomedical antennas. The third aim is to investigate the impact of the water temperature in the phantom-cooking phase on the dielectric properties of the stabilized phantom. The evaluations show that the dielectric properties of the developed phantoms correspond closely to those of real human tissue. The error in dielectric properties varies between 0.5–8%. In the practical-scenario simulations, the differences obtained with phantoms-based simulations in S21 parameters are 0.1–13 dB. However, the differences are smaller in the frequency ranges used for medical applications.

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) has been utilized already around three decades for monitoring the brain, in particular, oxygenation changes in the cerebral cortex. In addition, other optical techniques are currently developed for in vivo imaging and in the near future can be potentially used more in human brain research. This paper reviews the most common label-free optical technologies exploited in brain monitoring and their current and potential clinical applications. Label-free tissue monitoring techniques do not require the addition of dyes or molecular contrast agents. The following optical techniques are considered: fNIRS, diffuse correlations spectroscopy (DCS), photoacoustic imaging (PAI) and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Furthermore, wearable optical brain monitoring with the most common applications is discussed.

Studies with magnetoencephalography (MEG) are still quite rarely combined simultaneously with methods that can provide a metabolic dimension to MEG investigations. In addition, continuous blood pressure measurements which comply with MEG compatibility requirements are lacking. For instance, by combining methods reflecting neurovascular status one could obtain more information on low frequency fluctuations that have recently gained increasing interest as a mediator of functional connectivity within brain networks. This paper presents a multimodal brain imaging setup, capable to non-invasively and continuously measure cerebral hemodynamic, cardiorespiratory and blood pressure oscillations simultaneously with MEG. In the setup, all methods apart from MEG rely on the use of fibre optics. In particular, we present a method for measuring of blood pressure and cardiorespiratory oscillations continuously with MEG. The potential of this type of multimodal setup for brain research is demonstrated by our preliminary studies on human, showing effects of mild hypercapnia, gathered simultaneously with the presented modalities.

In-vivo microscopical studies indicate that brain cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) transport driven by blood vessel pulsations is reduced in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We hypothesized that the coupling pattern between cerebrovascular pulsations and CSF is altered in AD, and this can be measured using multi-wavelength functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). To study this, we quantified simultaneously cerebral hemo- and CSF hydrodynamics in early AD patients and age-matched healthy controls. Physiological pulsations were analysed in the vasomotor very low frequency (VLF 0.008–0.1 Hz), respiratory (Resp. 0.1–0.6 Hz), and cardiac (Card. 0.6–5 Hz) bands. A sliding time window cross-correlation approach was used to estimate the temporal stability of the cerebrovascular-CSF coupling. We investigated how the lag time series variation of the coupling differs between AD patients and control. The couplings involving deoxyhemoglobin (HbR) and CSF water, along with their first derivative, in the cardiac band demonstrated significant difference between AD patients and controls. Furthermore, the lag time series variation of HbR-CSF in the cardiac band provided a significant relationship, p-value = 0.04 and r² = 0.16, with the mini-mental state exam (MMSE) score. In conclusion, the coupling pattern between hemodynamics and CSF is reduced in AD and it correlates with MMSE score.