A new imaging technique can see through opaque walls with more detail than the physics of sound should allow.
April 29, 2026
Original Paper
Sub-acoustic resolution photoacoustic imaging through scattering layers using speckle correlations
arXiv · 2604.24168
The Takeaway
Photoacoustic imaging uses light to create sound waves that can see inside objects, but it is usually limited by the wavelength of that sound. A new method uses the speckle patterns of light to bypass these fundamental limits. It can reconstruct sharp images of objects hidden behind scattering layers that would normally look like a blurry mess. This breakthrough effectively allows doctors to see through skin and tissue with unprecedented clarity. It could lead to non-invasive medical scans that have the resolution of a microscope without needing to cut anything open.
From the abstract
Optical scattering presents a major obstacle to high resolution imaging in biological tissue and other turbid media. Conventional photoacoustic imaging can partially overcome this obstacle, enabling imaging of optical absorption in the multiple-scattering regime, but its resolution remains limited by acoustic diffraction. In this work we explore a strategy to overcome this limit by exploiting correlations in the illumination patterns produced by coherent scattered light. Combining controlled spe