Dynamic Monitoring of Intestinal Ischemia-reperfusion Injury in Rats by Photoacoustic Tomography

Intestinal ischemia and reperfusion injury is a severe disease in clinical-surgical conditions. The local tissue is damaged during ischemia, but restoration of the blood perfusion, however, exacerbates the lesions caused by ischemia, thus leading to systemic inflammatory response and multiple organ dysfunction syndrome (MODS). The mechanisms that induce intestinal ischemia-reperfusion injury are complex and many pathological processes are involved in the syndrome formation, such as apoptosis, calcium overload, oxygen-free radical damage, and energy attenuation. In this study, we tried to monitor the dynamic changes of ischemia-reperfusion injury in the small intestine of rats by photoacoustic tomography. The results show that photoacoustic tomography has the potential to monitor the changes of blood perfusion in mesenteric vessels in real-time and to observe the structural features of the small intestine. This provides a new tool for studying the mechanism of intestinal ischemia-reperfusion injury.