| Recent researches on Alzheimer disease raise new assumptions as for the causes of this disease. Some of these assumptions associate it to various neuronal processes which are studied on small animals.; In addition, the development of molecular imaging techniques allows to quantify various physiological processes. However, the spatial resolution of most of the existing techniques is often too weak to study the neuronal processes targeted by those researches. Developed during the last years, photoacoustic imaging is a molecular non-invasive technique allowing to obtain a precise space resolution for these studies. This technique detects the molecular vibrations generated by a pulsed light source.; This thesis describes the design of a photoacoustic imaging device which can be used in order to generate precise images of the distribution of fluorescent proteins. The fluorescent proteins are used as genetic markers on transgenic mice models studied within the framework of those researches. The mechanical, electrical and software design of the system are presented, as an algorithm used to reconstruct images at a molecular scale.; The results presented in this thesis are obtained from gelatine samples. First, micrometer-width tubes filled with black ink are inserted in a gelatine, allowing to estimate the resolution of the system to approximately 500 micrometers. Than, a lysate of dead cells expressing a fluorescent protein is used in order to validate the concept of photoacoustic on those proteins. |
