a Schematic of the system. The entire solid tumour is illuminated from four sides by a four-arm fibre bundle. A cylindrically focused linear array is designed to detect optoacoustic signals from the tumour. In vivo imaging is performed in conical scanning geometry by controlling the rotation and translation stages. The sensing part of the transducer array and the tumour are submerged in water to provide acoustic coupling. b Maximum intensity projections of the optoacoustic reconstruction of a phantom of polyethylene microspheres (diameter, 20 μm) dispersed in agar. The inset shows a zoomed-in view of the region boxed with a yellow dashed line. In addition, the yellow boxes are signal profiles along the x, y and z axes across the microsphere centre, as well as the corresponding full width at half-maximum values. c Normalized absorption spectra of Hb, HbO2 and gold nanoparticles (AuNPs). The spectrum for the AuNPs was obtained using a USB4000 spectrometer (Ocean Optics, Dunedin, FL, USA), while the spectra for Hb and HbO2 were taken from http://omlc.org/spectra/haemoglobin/index.html. The vertical dashed lines indicate the five wavelengths used to stimulate the three absorbers: 710, 750, 780, 810 and 850 nm. Optoacoustic signals were filtered into a low-frequency band (red) and high-frequency band (green), which were used to reconstruct separate images.