Int J Thyroidol.  2022 May;15(1):23-27. 10.11106/ijt.2022.15.1.23.

Photoacoustic Analysis Techniques for Thyroid Cancers: Principles and Applications

• Kim J

• KMID: 2530122
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.11106/ijt.2022.15.1.23

Abstract

Thyroid cancers are commonly diagnosed worldwide with a continuously increasing incident rate. The ultrasonography is the gold standard method for triaging thyroid nodules to biopsy. Although it has successfully triaged cancerous nodules, many benign nodules also have been triaged to be taken an invasive biopsy, which leads to the overdiagnosing issue. Photoacoustic imaging is an emerging biomedical imaging technique that can provide molecular functional information of biological tissues. Recently, there have been trials to investigate thyroid nodules by using clinically relevant photoacoustic imaging systems. In this review, the principles and applications of the photoacoustic imaging systems for analyzing thyroid nodules are overviewed. Although this technique still has a lot of ways to go for clinical translation, its initial results show great potential to be used for triaging thyroid nodules in vivo.

Keyword

Thyroid nodules; Photoacoustic imaging; Ultrasound imaging; Multispectral analysis; Biomedical imaging

Figure

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  Fig. 1 Schematic illustration of PA imaging. PA: photoacoustic, US: ultrasound

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  Fig. 2 (A) Photograph of the clinical PA and US imaging system. (B) PA images of blood vessel network in the human forearm. FB: fiber bundle, PA: photoacoustic, TR: transducer, US: ultrasound. The images are reproduced with permission from Ref. 26.

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  Fig. 3 (A) Multispectral PA analysis of human thyroid in vivo. (B) Three-dimensional illustrations of the multiparametric values with the classification results. (C) Classification results of the thyroid nodules based on the SVM decision function values. (D) Classification results of the thyroid nodules based on the ATAP score. ATAP: the American Thyroid Association and the photoacoustic probability of PTC, B: benign, ND: nodule, PA: photoacoustic, PTC: papillary thyroid cancer, Se: sensitivity, sO2: hemoglobin oxygen saturation, Sp: specificity, SVM: support vector machine, US: ultrasound. The images are reproduced with permission from Ref. 28.

Reference

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