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Tongue cancer is an increasingly common disease with high morbidity. Besides clinical observation, biomedical imaging techniques have been investigated for early detection of tongue cancer. In this paper, we proposed a co-registered dual-modality photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound imaging technique to simultaneously map the functional and structural information of human tongue, which has the potential to detect and diagnose tongue cancer in early stage. The imaging probe comprises a 20-MHz side-view focused transducer for ultrasound imaging and PA detection, a light path constructed by a multimode optical fiber, and a prism for PA illumination. Phantom experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the system including penetration depth, spatial resolution and signal-to-noise ratio. In vivo imaging of animal tumor and human tongue was carried out to show the feasibility of the proposed technique to detect tumor lesions in human tongue. The results of phantom and in vivo experiments suggest that the proposed technique has the potential to detect the early-stage cancer lesions in human tongue.