Enabling high-speed wide-field dynamic imaging in multifocal photoacoustic computed microscopy: A simulation study

Photoacoustic-computed microscopy (PACM) is an emerging technology that employs thousands of optical foci to provide wide-field high-resolution images of tissue optical absorption. A major limitation of PACM is the slow imaging speed, limiting its usage in dynamic imaging. In this study, we improved the speed through a two-step approach. First, we employed compressed sensing with partially known support to reduce the transducer element number, which subsequently improved the imaging speed at each optical scanning step. Second, we use the high-speed low-resolution image acquired without microlens array to inform dynamic changes in the high-resolution PACM image. Combining both approaches, we achieved high-resolution dynamic imaging over a wide field.