Abstract
Fluorescence microscopy can visualize the distribution of fluorescent molecules of interest in living tissues
with high spatial resolution and high contrast. However, with increasing the observation depth, it
becomes difficult to visualize molecules accurately because of light scattering in living tissues. As one
of the imaging to improve the observation depth, photoacoustic microscopy (PAM) has been attracting
attention. Because the thickness of skin is several mm, PAM is useful to visualize structures in whole
skin with high contrast and high spatial resolution. In this paper, we have demonstrated the visualization
of blood vessels in mouse ear using PAM with adaptive optics. In addition, we have introduced the combination
of PAM and nonlinear optics to improve depth resolution without using high-frequency components
of generated photoacoustic waves.
