Sensitivity enhanced photo-thermal borders detection in bio-phantoms enriched with gold nanoparticles

¹Faculty of Engineering, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 5290002, Israel

²Institute for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 5290002, Israel

Adv. Mater. Lett., 2018, 9 (7), pp 471-475

DOI: 10.5185/amlett.2018.1860

Publication Date (Web): Jun 14, 2018

Copyright © IAAM-VBRI Press

E-mail: zeev.zalevsky@biu.ac.il

Abstract

In the last decade diversity of applications in the fields of diagnostics and treatment for biomedical applications using gold nanoparticles (GNPs) as contrast agent sprang up. The strong optical absorption and scattering properties of the GNPs due to their localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) effect enables their use as contrast agents in these applications. The usage of the light-scattering properties of the GNPs in most imaging methods lead to background noise stems from light scattering from the tissue due to the same wavelengths of the illumination source and the GNPs’ scattering. In our previous works we presented a method to improve border detection of bio-phantoms enriched with GNPs leading for real-time complete tumor resection by using a modulated laser illumination, photo thermal imaging camera and the optical absorption of specially targeted GNPs. In this system the thermal camera detects the temperature field of the illuminated bio-phantoms. Although the surrounding area got heated the border location was detected at a precision of at least 0.5 mm through use of a simple post processing technique. In this paper, we present a continuation of our previous research with modified system of time sequence labelling (TSL) processing for improved border detection capable of operating and detecting borders at much lower signal to noise levels.

Keywords

Photo thermal imaging, gold nanoparticles, localized surface plasmon resonance, image processing.