Compressed sensing in photoacoustic imaging and application for planar detection geometries

Fast data acquisition is a central aspect of photoacoustic imaging. Increasing the imaging speed is especially crucial for optical detection schemes where an optical interrogation beam is scanned along a planar detection surface and the ultrasonic waves are recorded at each position sequentially. In this work, we demonstrate that the number of measurements in photoacoustic imaging can significantly be reduced by using techniques of compressed sensing. A main requirement in compressed sensing is the sparsity of the unknowns to be recovered. Sparsity of the pressure wave as a function of space and time is not valid directly. Therefore, we introduce the concept of sparsifying temporal transforms for three-dimensional photoacoustic imaging. We present reconstruction results for simulated data verifying that the proposed compressed sensing scheme allows a significant reduction of the number of spatial measurements without sacrificing the spatial resolution.