In vivo optical-resolution photoacoustic computed tomography with compressed sensing

Optical-resolution photoacoustic microscopy is becoming a powerful research tool for studying microcirculation in vivo. Moreover, ultrasonic-array-based optical-resolution photoacoustic computed tomography (OR-PACT), providing comparable resolution at an improved speed, has opened up new opportunities for studying microvascular dynamics. In this Letter, we have developed a compressed sensing with partially known support (CS-PKS) photoacoustic reconstruction strategy for OR-PACT. Compared with conventional backprojection reconstruction, the CS-PKS strategy was shown to produce high-quality in vivo OR-PACT images with threefold less measurement data, which can be leveraged to improve the data acquisition speed and costs of OR-PACT systems. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America