Abstract

Quantitative photoacoustic tomography is an emerging imaging technique aiming at estimating the distribution of optical parameters inside tissue from photoacoustic image which is formed by combining optical information and ultrasound propagation. In this paper reconstruction of absorption and scattering distributions using the radiative transfer equation and the diffusion approximation as forward models for light propagation is investigated. Data is simulated using Monte Carlo method and different size target domains are considered. The results show that the radiative transfer equation can estimate both absorption and scattering distributions with good accuracy. Furthermore, in the simulated test cases, the diffusion approximation can produce as good estimates for absorption as the radiative transfer equation.

© 2013 SPIE