Combined ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging has attracted significant interests for intravascular imaging such as atheromatous\nplaque detection, with ultrasound imaging providing spatial location and morphology and photoacoustic imaging highlighting\nmolecular composition of the plaque. Conventional ultrasound imaging systems utilize piezoelectric ultrasound transducers,\nwhich suffer from limited frequency bandwidths and reduced sensitivity with miniature transducer elements. Recent advances\non optical methods for both ultrasound generation and detection have shown great promise, as they provide efficient and\nultrabroadband ultrasound generation and sensitive and ultrabroadband ultrasound detection. As such, all-optical ultrasound\nimaging has a great potential to become a next generation ultrasound imaging method. In this paper, we review recent\ndevelopments on optical ultrasound transmitters, detectors, and all-optical ultrasound imaging systems, with a particular focus\non fiber-based probes for intravascular imaging. We further discuss our thoughts on future directions on developing combined\nall-optical photo acoustic and ultrasound imaging systems for intravascular imaging.
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