  The sensitivity of phase-sensitive detectors, such as piezoelectric
detectors, becomes increasingly directional as the detector element size
increases. In contrast, pyroelectric sensors, which are phase-insensitive,
retain their omni-directionality even for large element sizes, although they
have significantly poorer temporal resolution. This study uses numerical models
to examine whether phase-insensitive detectors can be used advantageously in
ultrasound tomography, specifically absorption tomography, when the number of
detectors is sparse. We present measurement models for phase-sensitive and
phase-insensitive sensors and compare the quality of the absorption
reconstructions between these sensor types based on image contrast metrics. We
perform the inversion using synthetic data with a Jacobian-based linearised
matrix inversion approach.
