Quantitative photoacoustic imaging in the radiative transport regime

Abstract

The objective of quantitative photoacoustic tomography (QPAT) is to reconstruct optical and thermodynamic properties of heterogeneous media from data of absorbed energy distribution inside the media. There have been extensive theoretical and computational studies on the inverse problem in QPAT, however, mostly in the diffusive regime. We present in this work some numerical reconstruction algorithms for multi-source QPAT in the radiative transport regime with energy data collected at either single or multiple wavelengths. We show that when the medium to be probed is non-scattering, explicit reconstruction schemes can be derived to reconstruct the absorption and the Gruneisen coefficients. When data at multiple wavelengths are utilized, we can reconstruct simultaneously the absorption, scattering and Gruneisen coefficients. We show by numerical simulations that the reconstructions are stable.