Frequency domain, photoacoustic tomography with sparse frequency samples

Photoacoustic imaging provides a high resolution imaging solution for biological tissues. In this paper, we consider recovering the z-averaged spatial distribution using a cylindrical array of sensors long in the z-direction. This configuration can be applied for breast imaging. In previous frequency domain algorithms there is no way to determine the optimum, minimum number of frequency samples required. We propose a novel frequency domain algorithm which uses a minimum number of frequency samples for image reconstruction. Further, we propose a method to calculate this minimum number of frequency samples. Provided there is no aliasing our proposed method, using a reduced number of frequency samples, provides similar results to previous frequency reconstruction methods.