Combined optoacoustic/ultrasound system for tomographic absorption measurements: possibilities and limitations.

In this paper, we present the OPUS (optoacoustic plus ultrasound) system, which is a combination of a wavelength-tunable pulsed optical parametrical oscillator (OPO) laser with a commercial ultrasound (US) scanner. Optoacoustic (OA) or, synonymously, photoacoustic (PA) imaging is a spectroscopic technique to measure optical absorption in semitransparent solids and liquids. The measured signal is an acoustical pressure wave, which represents the absorption of pulsed optical radiation.