Detection and numerical simulation of optoacoustic near- and farfield signals observed in PVA hydrogel phantoms

We present numerical simulations for modelling optoacoustic (OA) signals observed in PVA hydrogel tissue phantoms. We review the computational approach to model the underlying mechanisms, i.e. optical absorption of laser energy and acoustic propagation of mechanical stress, geared towards experiments that involve absorbing media only. We apply the numerical procedure to model signals observed in the acoustic near- and farfield in both, forward and backward detection mode, in PVA hydrogel tissue phantoms (i.e. an elastic solid). Further, we illustrate the computational approach by modeling OA signal for several experiments on dye solution (i.e. a liquid) reported in the literature, and benchmark the research code by comparing our fully 3D procedure to limiting cases described in terms of effectively 1D approaches.