Photoacoustic imaging has been developed as a new biomedical molecular imaging modality. Due to its similarity to conventional ultrasound imaging in terms of signal detection and image generation, dual-modal photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging has been applied to visualize physiological and morphological information in biological systems in vivo. By complementing each other, dual-modal photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging showed synergistic advances in photoacoustic imaging with the guidance of ultrasound images. In this review, we introduce our recent progresses in dual-modal photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging systems at various scales of study, from preclinical small animals to clinical humans. A summary of the works reveals various strategies for combining the structural information of ultrasound images with the molecular information of photoacoustic images.
Keywords: Photoacoustic imaging; biomedical studies; clinical applications; dual-modal imaging; small-animal imaging; ultrasound imaging.