Compressive photoacoustic imaging in scattering media

Nowadays optical imaging in highly scattering media is still challenging to meet the requirement for wide-field visualization with a high resolution across the physical and biomedical science. Photoacoustic imaging, which relies on the ultrasonic waves emitted by absorbing structures under pulsed light illumination via thermoelastic stress generation, provides an efficient way to overcome the optical diffusion limitation. Compressive sensing, an efficiently signal processing technique by finding solutions to underdetermined linear systems, is adapted to reduce the burden posed by traditional imaging requirements. It can be used to improve the trade-off between spatial resolution and acquisition time of sequential measurements, which can overcome the limiting of real-time applications to relative low resolutions. Based on compressive sensing, we design a photoacoustic imaging system that can achieve effective 3D imaging in scattering media with just a few sensors. It has the capability to image structured objects hidden in diffused media with a high resolution at a faster pace and works in the fields where the signal reduction is beneficial such as invasive bioimaging.