Gerhard Zangerl

Gerhard Zangerl, Markus Haltmeier, Linh V. Nguyen et al.

Recently, a novel measurement setup has been introduced to photoacoustic tomography, that collects data in the form of projections of the full 3D acoustic pressure distribution at a certain time instant. Existing imaging algorithms for this kind of data assume a constant speed of sound. This assumption is not always met in practice and thus leads to erroneous reconstructions. In this paper, we present a two-step reconstruction method for full field detection photoacoustic tomography that takes variable speed of sound into account. In the first step, by applying the inverse Radon transform, the pressure distribution at the measurement time is reconstructed point-wise from the projection data. In the second step, one solves a final time wave inversion problem where the initial pressure distribution is recovered from the known pressure distribution at the measurement time. For the latter problem, we derive an iterative solution approach, compute the required adjoint operator, and show its uniqueness and stability.

Markus Haltmeier, Gerhard Zangerl, Peter Schier et al.

Magnetorelaxometry imaging is a novel tool for quantitative determination of the spatial distribution of magnetic nanoparticle inside an organism. The use of multiple excitation patterns has been demonstrated to significantly improve spatial resolution. However, increasing the number of excitation patterns is considerably more time consuming, because several sequential measurements have to be performed. In this paper, we use compressed sensing in combination with sparse recovery to reduce the total measurement time and to improve spatial resolution. For image reconstruction, we propose using the Douglas-Rachford splitting algorithm applied to the sparse Tikhonov functional including a positivity constraint. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the resulting algorithm is capable to accurately recover the magnetic nanoparticle distribution from a small number of activation patterns. For example, our algorithm applied with 10 activations yields half the reconstruction error of quadratic Tikhonov regularization applied with 50 activations, for a tumor-like phantom.

Gerhard Zangerl, Alexander Steinicke

A kinematic chain in three-dimensional Euclidean space consists of $n$ links that are connected by spherical joints. Such a chain is said to be within a closed configuration when its link lengths form a closed polygonal chain in three dimensions. We investigate the space of configurations, described in terms of joint angles of its spherical joints, that satisfy the the loop closure constraint, meaning that the kinematic chain is closed. In special cases, we can find a new set of parameters that describe the diagonal lengths (the distance of the joints from the origin) of the configuration space by a simple domain, namely a cube of dimension $n-3$. We expect that the new findings can be applied to various problems such as motion planning for closed kinematic chains or singularity analysis of their configuration spaces. To demonstrate the practical feasibility of the new method, we present numerical examples.

Gerhard Zangerl, Sunghwan Moon, Markus Haltmeier

Photoacoustic image reconstruction often assumes that the restriction of the acoustic pressure on the detection surface is given. However, commonly used detectors often have a certain directivity and frequency dependence, in which case the measured data are more accurately described as a linear combination of the acoustic pressure and its normal derivative on the detection surface. In this paper, we consider the inverse source problem for data that are a combination of an acoustic pressure of the wave equation and its normal derivative For the special case of a spherical detection geometry we derive exact frequency domain reconstruction formulas. We present numerical results showing the robustness and validity of the derived formulas. Moreover, we compare several different combinations of the pressure and its normal derivative showing that used measurement model significantly affects the recovered initial pressure.