Reconstructing absorption and scattering distributions in quantitative photoacoustic tomography

Abstract

Quantitative photoacoustic tomography is a novel hybrid imaging technique aiming at estimating optical parameters inside tissues. The method combines (functional) optical information and accurate anatomical information obtained using ultrasound techniques. The optical inverse problem of quantitative photoacoustic tomography is to estimate the optical parameters within tissue when absorbed optical energy density is given. In this paper we consider reconstruction of absorption and scattering distributions in quantitative photoacoustic tomography. The radiative transport equation and diffusion approximation are used as light transport models and solutions in different size domains are investigated. The simulations show that scaling of the data, for example by using logarithmic data, can be expected to significantly improve the convergence of the minimization algorithm. Furthermore, both the radiative transport equation and diffusion approximation can give good estimates for absorption. However, depending on the optical properties and the size of the domain, the diffusion approximation may not produce as good estimates for scattering as the radiative transport equation.