Quantitative Imaging of Bilirubin by Photoacoustic Microscopy

Noninvasive detection of both bilirubin concentration and its distribution is important for disease diagnosis. Here we implemented photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) to detect bilirubin distribution. We first demonstrate that our PAM system can measure the absorption spectra of bilirubin and blood. We also image bilirubin distributions in tissue-mimicking samples, both without and with blood mixed. Our results show that PAM has the potential to quantitatively image bilirubin in vivo for clinical applications.