Compressed-sensing Photoacoustic Imaging based on random optical illumination

Limited-view acquisition suffers from artefacts and loss of resolution for reconstruction-based Photoacoustic Imaging (PAI). In this paper, a completely new acquisition and reconstruction scheme is reported to achieve artefact-free imaging from limited-view acquisition. The method employs spatially and temporally varying random optical illumination instead of the uniform illumination used in conventional PAI methods. Compressed Sensing (CS) is also used to reduce the number of random illuminations for fast data acquisition speed. Numerical simulations demonstrated that images can be recovered from acquisitions with as few as two transducer view angles. This novel scheme can potentially eliminate both the mechanical scanning of single-element ultrasonic transducer and the expensive ultrasonic array transducer.