A one-step reconstruction algorithm for quantitative photoacoustic imaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel one-step inversion algorithm for quantitative photoacoustic tomography that directly reconstructs optical absorption and ultrasound speed from acoustic data, simplifying the traditional two-step process.

Contribution

The work presents a new one-step reconstruction method for QPAT that can recover optical and acoustic properties simultaneously from multiple datasets, improving efficiency and potentially accuracy.

Findings

Feasibility demonstrated through numerical simulations.

Can recover absorption coefficient and ultrasound speed simultaneously.

Works with multiple acoustic data sets and prior bounds.

Abstract

Quantitative photoacoustic tomography (QPAT) is a recent hybrid imaging modality that couples optical tomography with ultrasound imaging to achieve high resolution imaging of optical properties of scattering media. Image reconstruction in QPAT is usually a two-step process. In the first step, the initial pressure field inside the medium, generated by the photoacoustic effect, is reconstructed using measured acoustic data. In the second step, this initial ultrasound pressure field datum is used to reconstruct optical properties of the medium. We propose in this work a one-step inversion algorithm for image reconstruction in QPAT that reconstructs the optical absorption coefficient directly from measured acoustic data. The algorithm can be used to recover simultaneously the absorption coefficient and the ultrasound speed of the medium from \emph{multiple} acoustic data sets, with appropriate \emph{a priori} bounds on the unknowns. We demonstrate, through numerical simulations based on synthetic data, the feasibility of the proposed reconstruction method.