Photoacoustic imaging: A potential new tool for diagnosing vasculogenic erectile dysfunction

Erectile dysfunction (ED) is a frequent disorder in aging men, affecting men's physical and mental health seriously. Generally, clinical diagnosis of the physical ED need image of penile vessels to distinguish vasculogenic ED disorders from psychological disorders so as to determine an appropriate treatment. The aim of this study is to present a novel photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) for imaging of vasculogenic ED with a high resolution and a high sensitivity. In this work, a vessel phantom using a carbon pencil and ten animals' penis models isolated from health rats both were prepared carefully. A home-made PAM platform was builted for rat's penile vessels, and the corresponding two dimensional (2D) PAM image was obtained for each model. Particularly, an imaging capability of a high spatial resolution of five hundreds microns with high contrast was obtained. The preliminary imaging results of isolated penis vessel clearly indicated that the method of photoacoustic imaging would be a useful diagnostic tool for assessing vasculogenic ED and could improve the diagnosis of venous leakage visualization by combining structural and functional imaging.