Liquid-assisted femtosecond laser ablation of hybrid oxide nanoparticles with potenial applicaiton in medical imaging diagnosis

Abstract

Medical imaging technologies such as mammography, magnetic resonance imaging and computed X-ray tomography play a leading role in the diagnosis of breast cancer. However clinical application of this multimodal approach is still problematic due the lack of appropriate commercial cantrast agents showing capabilities to distinguish between malignant tumours and benign abnormal masses. Hybrid nanoparticles, which contain in the same structure magnetic and radiopaque elements are a prornising alternative for the generation of these multimodal cantrast agents due to their unique characteristics, such as: high biocompatibility, cantrast enhancement efficacy, cost effectiveness and colloidal stability in the physiological environment. Liquid-Assisted Pulsed Laser Ablation (LA-PLA) of massive metal plates has proved as an efficient synthesis method to produce a wide range of stable nanoparticles in a variety of liquid solutions [1 ,2]. A major part ofthis work is production ofmultimodal nanoparticles by femtosecond laser treatment [3-5]. This method consists in the laser ablation of custom-made cerarnic plates of binary rnixed metal oxides (FeW06, FeLa03 and FeTa04) submerged in different liquids water and ethanol which contain both a magnetic (iron) and a radiopaque element, showing the same composition ofthe projected multimodal nanoparticles. The size distribution, chernical composition, and structure of the as-synthesized nanoparticles are going tobe identified by X-Ray Diffraction, Transmission Electron Microscopy, Selected Area Electron Diffraction and Energy-dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy. We are going to explore the influence ofthe quality ofthe cerarnic plates, nature ofthe solvent and laser parameters (wavelength, energy, repetition rate, fluence, scanning velocity, pulse number) on the nanoparticle productivity and characteristics ofthe colloidal nanoparticles.