M. Agranovsky, P. Kuchment, L. Kunyansky
The paper surveys recent progress in establishing uniqueness and developing inversion formulas and algorithms for the thermoacoustic tomography. In mathematical terms, one deals with a rather special inverse problem for the wave equation. In the case of constant sound speed, it can also be interpreted as a problem concerning the spherical mean transform.
Janek Gröhl, Leonid Kunyansky, Jenni Poimala et al.
Quantitative comparison of the quality of photoacoustic image reconstruction algorithms remains a major challenge. No-reference image quality measures are often inadequate, but full-reference measures require access to an ideal reference image. While the ground truth is known in simulations, it is unknown in vivo, or in phantom studies, as the reference depends on both the phantom properties and the imaging system. We tackle this problem by using numerical digital twins of tissue-mimicking phantoms and the imaging system to perform a quantitative calibration to reduce the simulation gap. The contributions of this paper are two-fold: First, we use this digital-twin framework to compare multiple state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms. Second, among these is a Fourier transform-based reconstruction algorithm for circular detection geometries, which we test on experimental data for the first time. Our results demonstrate the usefulness of digital phantom twins by enabling assessment of the accuracy of the numerical forward model and enabling comparison of image reconstruction schemes with full-reference image quality assessment. We show that the Fourier transform-based algorithm yields results comparable to those of iterative time reversal, but at a lower computational cost. All data and code are publicly available on Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15388429.
Peter Kuchment, Leonid Kunyansky
This is the manuscript of the chapter for a planned Handbook of Mathematical Methods in Imaging that surveys the mathematical models, problems, and algorithms of the Thermoacoustic (TAT) and Photoacoustic (PAT) Tomography. TAT and PAT represent probably the most developed of the several novel ``hybrid'' methods of medical imaging. These new modalities combine different physical types of waves (electromagnetic and acoustic in case of TAT and PAT) in such a way that the resolution and contrast of the resulting method are much higher than those achievable using only acoustic or electromagnetic measurements.