A dissipative time reversal technique for photo-acoustic tomography in a cavity

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel dissipative time reversal method for photo-acoustic tomography in cavities with reflective boundaries, enabling accurate image reconstruction even when standard methods fail due to non-decaying solutions.

Contribution

It develops a new time reversal technique with dissipative boundary conditions, extending applicability to perfectly reflecting cavities in photo-acoustic tomography.

Findings

The method converges for larger measurement times.

Iterative refinement improves initial approximations.

The approach ensures decay of error via dissipative boundary conditions.

Abstract

We consider the inverse source problem arising in thermo- and photo-acoustic tomography. It consists in reconstructing the initial pressure from the boundary measurements of the acoustic wave. Our goal is to extend versatile time reversal techniques to the case of perfectly reflecting boundary of the domain. Standard time reversal works only if the solution of the direct problem decays in time, which does not happen in the setup we consider. We thus propose a novel time reversal technique with a non-standard boundary condition. The error induced by this time reversal technique satisfies the wave equation with a dissipative boundary condition and, therefore, decays in time. For larger measurement times, this method yields a close approximation; for smaller times, the first approximation can be iteratively refined, resulting in a convergent Neumann series for the approximation.