Compressed-sensing photoacoustic computed tomography in vivo with partially known support

Compressed sensing (CS) can recover sparse signals from undersampled measurements. In this work, we have developed an advanced CS framework for photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT). During the reconstruction, a small part of the nonzero signals locations in the transformed sparse domain is used as partially known support (PKS). PACT reconstructions have been performed with under-sampled in vivo image data of human hands and a rat. Compared to PACT with basic CS, PACT with CS-PKS can recover signals using fewer ultrasonic transducer elements and can improve convergence speed, which may ultimately enable high-speed, low-cost PACT for various biomedical applications.