A new type of handheld scanner that provides detailed microvascular imaging in close to real time could transform the way that certain conditions are diagnosed, including cancer, cardiovascular disease and arthritis.

Microvascular scanning involves looking at the parts of the circulatory system made up of the smallest blood vessels.

Subtle changes in these veins and arteries, which are less than a millimetre in diameter, can provide an early marker of disease and provide other valuable information.

Scanning can be done using a technique known as photoacoustic tomography (PAT) imaging, which employs laser-generated ultrasound waves to produce highly detailed 3D microvascular images.

Clinical use has been limited, however, due to the time it took existing PAT systems to produce the images.

Older scanners could take five minutes or more to generate a usable image, with the patient having to remain motionless during the process.

Now, researchers at University College London have developed a handheld scanner that can produce scans in a few seconds – or even hundreds of milliseconds – making the technology much easier to deploy.

New scanner produces images between 100 and 1,000 times faster

The team employed a number of techniques, including using excitation lasers with high pulse-repetition frequencies and exploiting compressed sensing to parallelise the optical architecture of the sensor read-out.

Study author Professor Paul Beard said that their scanner was able to produce images between 100 and 1,000 times faster than existing PAT scanners.

He said that this made photoacoustic tomography practical for clinical use for the first time.

The study, which is published in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, saw the scanner tested on patients with type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis or breast cancer, alongside healthy test subjects.

The scanner was able to successfully produce detailed 3D images in close to real time in the tests.

In patients with type 2 diabetes, for example, it was used to highlight deformities and structural changes in the microvascular vessels of the feet.

Professor Beard noted that the device could also be used to “look at aspects of human biology and disease that we haven’t been able to before”.

One potential use case could be assessing inflammatory arthritis, which requires a scan of all 20 finger joints in both hands.

It could also be utilised to spot cancer as tumours often have a high density of small blood vessels that are too small to see with other imaging techniques.

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