The use of acoustic reflectors to enlarge the effective area of planar sensor arrays

Planar sensor arrays have many advantages including ease of manufacture and low cost. However, when used for photoacoustic (PA) imaging, planar sensors have a limited view of the acoustic field, which means some of the waves from the PA source are not recorded. This results in artifacts in the reconstructed image of the PA source (the initial acoustic pressure distribution). In this paper, we describe novel sensor array configurations based on the Fabry Perot (FP) sensor and acoustic reflectors that retain its detection advantages while improving the visibility of the reconstructed PA image.