State-of-the-art optoacoustic tomographic imaging systems have been shown to attain three-dimensional (3D) frame rates of the order of 100 Hz. While such a high volumetric imaging speed is beyond reach for other bio-imaging modalities, it may still be insufficient to accurately monitor some faster events occurring on a millisecond scale. Increasing the 3D imaging rate is usually hampered by the limited throughput capacity of the data acquisition electronics and memory used to capture vast amounts of the generated optoacoustic (OA) data in real time. Herein, we developed a sparse signal acquisition scheme and a total-variation-based reconstruction approach in a combined space–time domain in order to achieve 3D OA imaging at kilohertz rates. By continuous monitoring of freely swimming zebrafish larvae in a 3D region, we demonstrate that the new approach enables significantly increasing the volumetric imaging rate by using a fraction of the tomographic projections without compromising the reconstructed image quality. The suggested method may benefit studies looking at ultrafast biological phenomena in 3D, such as large-scale neuronal activity, cardiac motion, or freely behaving organisms.

中文翻译：

---

千赫兹体积帧速率下的光声成像

最先进的光声层析成像系统已显示出达到100 Hz量级的三维（3D）帧速率。尽管如此高的体积成像速度是其他生物成像模式无法企及的，但它仍不足以准确地监视毫秒级发生的一些较快速的事件。3D成像速率的提高通常受到数据采集电子设备和用于实时捕获大量生成的光声（OA）数据的内存的有限吞吐量的限制。在这里，我们开发了一种稀疏信号采集方案和一个基于时空组合的时空组合重建方法，以实现千赫兹速率的3D OA成像。通过持续监控3D区域中自由游泳的斑马鱼幼虫，我们证明了这种新方法能够通过使用一部分断层摄影投影显着提高体积成像速率，而不会影响重建的图像质量。建议的方法可能有益于研究3D中的超快速生物学现象，例如大规模神经元活动，心脏运动或行为自由的生物。