Thermometry and photoacoustic-imaging outstanding nanoprobes
This project addresses the quest of new materials and approaches that nanotechnology requires to solve the current limitations of medicine. The potential to externally track and image organs and the potential presence and evolution of diseases by using light becomes a reality thanks to the use of especially tailored biocompatible nanoplatforms. New avenues to image living bodies by light allied with mechanical waves (i.e. sound) are going to be opened. We propose here an elegant marriage between light and sound endowing smartly designed nanoprobes with the capability of deep-tissue photoacoustic imaging, also accompanied by all-optical temperature sub-tissue measuring. To increase the penetration depth and spatial resolution, an imaging approach pumping the probes with near-infrared light is proposed. Therefore, we propose a kind of material no previously exploited for photoacoustic exogenous agent, working as bimodal nanoprobe by also optically measuring temperature within the biological transparency windows in the near-infrared