Photoacoustic Imaging Taking into Account Attenuation

TL;DR

This paper reviews and analyzes attenuation models in photoacoustic imaging, emphasizing causality, deriving related equations, and discussing the challenges in reconstructing unattenuated signals from attenuated data.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive review of attenuation models, examines their causality properties, derives governing equations, and discusses the ill-posedness of inverse problems in photoacoustic imaging.

Findings

Causality properties are crucial for inversion algorithms.

Derived integro-differential equations for attenuated waves.

Inverse problem for unattenuated wave reconstruction is ill-conditioned.

Abstract

First, we review existing attenuation models and discuss their causality properties, which we believe to be essential for algorithms for inversion with attenuated data. Then, we survey causality properties of common attenuation models. We also derive integro-differential equations which the attenuated waves are satisfying. In addition we discuss the ill--conditionness of the inverse problem for calculating the unattenuated wave from the attenuated one.