Speed of sound and photoacoustic imaging with an optical camera based ultrasound detection system

CCD camera based optical ultrasound detection is a promising alternative approach for high resolution 3D photoacoustic imaging (PAI). To fully exploit its potential and to achieve an image resolution <50 µm, it is necessary to incorporate variations of the speed of sound (SOS) in the image reconstruction algorithm. Hence, in the proposed work the idea and a first implementation are shown how speed of sound imaging can be added to a previously developed camera based PAI setup. The current setup provides SOS-maps with a spatial resolution of 2 mm and an accuracy of the obtained absolute SOS values of about 1%. The proposed dual-modality setup has the potential to provide highly resolved and perfectly co-registered 3D photoacoustic and SOS images.