Spatial Resolution in Photoacoustic Tomography: Effects of Detector Size and Detector Bandwidth

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is new imaging modality for visualizing the optical absorption coefficient of a probe. It has proven great promise for a variety of biomedical applications, such as imaging of animals, early cancer diagnostics, and imaging of vasculature (see [9, 21, 27, 30, 38, 39, 40, 43]). PAT is based on the excitation of acoustic pressure waves by illuminating a probe with short light pulses. The acoustic pressure is recorded outside of the object and used to reconstruct an image of the probe. We refer the reader to [36, Section 1.5] for a detailed mathematical description.