Piezoelectric line detector array for photoacoustic tomography.

Photoacoustic tomography relies on a dense coverage of the surface surrounding the imaged object with ultrasound sensors in order to enable an accurate reconstruction. A curved arrangement of integrating line sensors is proposed that is able to acquire data for a linear projection image of the absorbed energy density distribution in the object. Upon rotation of the object relative to the array, three-dimensional (3D) images can be obtained.