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The blood vessels are the most critical part of the human circulatory system. Information acquired on the structure and status of blood vessels drives the development of numerous medical and biometric applications. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to find an effective way to sense vessel structures. Traditional methods, including infrared and Doppler sensing modalities, are limited by optical diffusion and ultrasonic scattering that are not good at vessel sensing with high performance. In comparison, we argue photoacoustic (PA) sensing is an emerging technique that can image 3D vessel structure deep in tissue with high-resolution visualization, maintaining the advantages of both optical and ultrasound methods. In this work, we propose and develop PAvessel, a practical 3D vessel structure sensing system based on PA effects. The entire sensing system comprises two key components, PA sensing hardware …