Imaging of myocardial infarction with thermoacoustic tomography: An ex vivo study

In the present study, we evaluated the feasibility of thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) for imaging of ex vivo mouse hearts with myocardial infarction. A circular scanning TAT system with an unfocused transducer was used to recover the dielectric property distribution of normal andmyocardial infarcted mouse heart tissues. The applicability of this myocardial infarction imaging system was validated using a model of myocardial infarction in two Sprague-Dawley rats and verified through comparison with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). TAT results not only indicated the location and ischemia and the extent of myocardial ischemia (MI), but also showed good imaging contrast between infarcted and normal myocardium without the use of contrast agent. The experimental results suggest that TAT may provide a unique opportunity to enable real-time precision imaging to determine the site of injury intraoperatively