Absorption of light generates heat and by modulating the light intensity, a sound wave can be generated. This effect, first described by A.G. Bell in 1880 (Am. J. Sci. 20 (118), 305 (1880)) and now known as the photoacoustic effect, has spurred plenty of engineers and scientists over decades. The effect is now well-used in medicine and neuroscience in the form of photoacoustic tomography (PAT) and microscopy (PAM), among other subtypes, with resolutions down to optical resolution, capable of revealing oxygen metabolism, gene expression, vasculature and specific biomarkers (L. Li, J. Yao, L.V. Wang, "Photoacoustic Tomography of Neural Systems" in Neural Engineering, 3rd ed. (Springer, 2020).

In this work, Guo et al. present a remarkable down scaling of their previous head-mounted microscope (targeted at rats) to a total weight of 1.8 g suitable for imaging in freely moving mice. It promises to be a valuable tool for long-term hemodynamic studies over days and possibly weeks, and supplement the wide range of brain activity related detection tools.

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