Advances in optoacoustic imaging: From benchside to clinic

Optoacoustic imaging has been widely used for in vivo disease diagnosis and therapy monitoring. Acquisition hardware, analysis, and contrast agents have been subject to much innovation, creating access to an ever-growing range of biomedical applications. In this review, a broad overview of optoacoustic theory, instrumentation and data processing is provided, together with the various categories of contrast agents that have been developed. In addition, the application of these techniques and contrast agents in preclinical and clinical imaging applications will be discussed in detail, ranging from imaging of cancer and various organs like skin, brain and breast to sentinel lymph node mapping. Finally under conclusions, we highlighted future perspectives in this field, in the context of instrumentation and software development, as well as advances in clinical translation.