Quantitative photoacoustic imaging in radiative transport regime

TL;DR

This paper develops numerical algorithms for quantitative photoacoustic tomography in the radiative transport regime, enabling the reconstruction of optical properties of media, including absorption, scattering, and Gruneisen coefficients, with stable results.

Contribution

It introduces new reconstruction algorithms for multi-source QPAT in the radiative transport regime, including explicit schemes for non-scattering media and multi-wavelength methods for complex media.

Findings

Explicit reconstruction schemes work for non-scattering media.

Multi-wavelength data allows simultaneous reconstruction of multiple coefficients.

Numerical simulations demonstrate stable reconstructions.

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.