Carotid plaque rupture causes most ischemic strokes, yet current diagnostics focus on arterial stenosis, overlooking 80–90% of vulnerable plaques. This highlights the need for affordable, precise, and non-invasive imaging to assess plaque vulnerability. To address this, we developed a low-cost, dual Ultrasound/Photoacoustic system integrating a Vermon L7.5-MHz ultrasound probe, a 128-channel programmable phased array Ultrasound scanner (Dasel, Spain), and pannels of pulsed semiconductor lasers diodes of 5W emitting 100 ns pulses at 447 nm. Synchronization was managed via external pulse generators, with laser light delivered through optical fibers. Validation utilised phantoms of black nylon threads. GPU-accelerated delayand-sum beamforming was used for image recontruction. The system achieved 530 µm lateral and 360 µm axial resolution. This system offers a cost-effective, non invasive approach for high-resolution multiparametric tissue characterization. Future aims will be to improve in vivo assessment of plaque vulnerability.