PACT system: The PACT system is based on a commercial ultrasound scanner (Vantage 256, Verasonics, Kirkland, Washington) with a linear array transducer (L7-4, Philips ATL, Atlanta, Georgia) (Fig. 1a). The linear array transducer has 128 elements, a central frequency of 5 MHz, and a 60% bandwidth. Laser pulses at 700 nm and 800 nm with a pulse energy of 13 mJ and 11 mJ were delivered through a multimode fiber (FT1500UMT, Thorlabs, Newton, New Jersey) with a numerical aperture of 0.39 and core diameter of 1.5 mm. The distal end of the fiber was fused with a lab-made catheter, which consisted of an air-filled cavity and a plano-concave lens (Edmund, Barrington, New Jersey) (Fig. 1b). The lens had an aperture size of 3 mm and a back focal length of -6.56 mm. The optical beam profile with and without the catheter was simulated using Zemax, and the cavity dimension was optimized based on the simulation results. The catheter has two functions: (1) With water as the surrounding medium, it provides a larger refractive index mismatch at the distal end of the fiber, and thus delivers beams with high divergence to cover a large area of the clot; (2) It separates the blood or clot debris from the fiber surface to avoid any contamination and generation of “hot spots” that can potentially damage the fiber.
Blood clot preparation: The blood clots were prepared based on a similar protocol from our previous work [39]. Bovine blood (Lampire, Pipesville, Pennsylvania) was mixed with 2.75% W/V CaCl2 solution (Fisher Scientific, Hampton, New Hampshire) with a volume ratio of 10:1 for coagulation. To change the oxygen saturation of hemoglobin (sO2), additional NaHCO3 (37 mg/ml of blood) or Na2S2O4 (2.5 mg/ml of blood) was added to the blood-CaCl2 solution, followed by 5-min oxygen or carbon dioxide perfusion [40], [41]. After mixing, the blood was transferred to either borosilicate or flint Pasteur pipets (Fisher Scientific, Hampton, New Hampshire) and immersed in a 37˚C water bath for 3 hours. After clot formation, the tubes were stored at 4˚C for 72 hours to induce clot retraction. Figure 1c shows a comparison between borosilicate (retracted) and flint (unretracted) clot [42].
PA imaging and data analysis: For PA imaging, the clot was extracted from the Pasteur pipets, rinsed with PBS, and placed around 5 mm away from the catheter inside a PBS-filled Tygon tube (4.76 mm ID). To demonstrate the deep tissue clot characterization with our PACT system, around ten-centimeter-thick chicken tissue was placed between the transducer and the Tygon tube (Fig. 1a). For each clot, 300 frames of two-dimensional PA data were acquired at each optical wavelength, and the images were reconstructed with both delay-and-sum (DAS) and delay-multiply-and-sum (DMAS) algorithms [43], [44]. While DAS preserves the linear dependence of the PA signals on the optical absorption, it often suffers from the strong limited-view reconstruction artifacts. DMAS is able to suppress the reconstruction artifacts, but it is a nonlinear process and cannot be used for sO2 estimation. Therefore, we combined the DAS and DMAS in our data processing. We used the DMAS image as a binary mask to reduce the artifacts in the DAS image. The masked DAS images after 300-frame-averaging were then used for sO2 estimation using the linear spectral unmixing method based on the absorption spectra of oxy- and deoxy-hemoglobin (Fig. 1d) [45]–[47]. We also investigated the acoustic frequency spectrum of the clot. To minimize the impact of the catheter signals, channel data from the transducer elements directly above the clot were extracted and processed with Fourier transform.
Histology examination of the clots
As the frequency components of the PA signal depend on the object size and stiffness, we compared our frequency spectrum with the histology results. Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining was conducted on all the clot samples imaged by PACT. After clot formation and retraction, the samples were fixed in 10% neutralized buffered formalin. The formalin fixed clot samples were cut into 5-µm-thick slices and stained with H&E. The slides were scanned using an EVOS compound light microscope (EVOS®FL Auto Imaging System, Life Technologies Corporation, Carlsbad, CA, USA) and images were stored digitally. The ImageJ software (National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA) and a custom processing algorithm (MATLAB R2018b, MathWorks, MA, USA) were used for the quantitative analysis with color-based segmentation. The retraction of the clot was estimated from the area percentage of the erythrocytes region in the clot histology images and was related to PA frequency spectrum analysis.
Measurement of the clot stiffness
Stiffness of the blood clots was tested with BioTester 5000 (CellScale, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada). Two rakes with five tungsten tines each were used at the two ends of the cylindrical clot in the longitudinal directions. Each group of the five tines were equally distributed along a sample dimension of 4.5 mm during the test. For each group of clots, three samples were tested with an average initial length of 6 mm. The samples were then subject to loading under 10%, 25% and 40% strain conditions for three loops, corresponding to a displacement of 600 µm, 1500 µm and 2400 µm, respectively. The force-displacement curve was recorded. Curve fitting was applied based on the linear phase of the force-displacement and the Young’s modulus was estimated as follows,
$$E=\frac{\sigma }{\epsilon }=\frac{F/A}{\varDelta l/l}$$
in which ε is the strain in the sample and σ is the stress. σ was acquired from the applied force F and the cross-section area A of the sample. l is the initial length of the clot and Δl is the displacement under the applied force.