We study the mathematical model of thermoacoustic tomography in media with a variable speed for a fixed time interval, greater than the diameter of the domain. In case of measurements on the whole boundary, we give an explicit solution in terms of a Neumann series expansion. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for uniqueness and stability when the measurements are taken on a part of the boundary.
We study the mathematical model of thermoacoustic and photoacoustic tomography when the sound speed has a jump across a smooth surface. This models the change of the sound speed in the skull when trying to image the human brain. We derive an explicit inversion formula in the form of a convergent Neumann series under the assumptions that all singularities from the support of the source reach the boundary.
We investigate the problem of recovering the initial displacement f for a solution u of a linear, isotropic, non-homogeneous elastic wave equation, given measurements of u on [0,T] x \partial Ω, where Ω\subset\R^3 is some bounded domain containing the support of f. For the acoustic wave equation, this problem is known as thermoacoustic tomography (TAT), and has been well-studied; for the elastic wave equation, the situation is somewhat more subtle, and we give sufficient conditions on the Lamé parameters to ensure that recovery is possible.
Thermoacoustic tomography is a term for the inverse problem of determining of one of initial conditions of a hyperbolic equation from boundary measurements. In the past publications both stability estimates and convergent numerical methods for this problem were obtained only under some restrictive conditions imposed on the principal part of the elliptic operator. In this paper logarithmic stability estimates are obatined for an arbitrary variable principal part of that operator. Convergence of the Quasi-Reversibility Method to the exact solution is also established for this case. Both complete…
The circular Radon transform integrates a function over the set of all spheres with a given set of centers. The problem of injectivity of this transform (as well as inversion formulas, range descriptions, etc.) arises in many fields from approximation theory to integral geometry, to inverse problems for PDEs, and recently to newly developing types of tomography. The article discusses known and provides new results that one can obtain by methods that essentially involve only the finite speed of propagation and domain dependence for the wave equation.
We present a family of closed form inversion formulas in thermoacoustic tomography in the case of a constant sound speed. The formulas are presented in both time-domain and frequency-domain versions. As special cases, they imply most of the previously known filtered backprojection type formulas.
We consider the problem of thermoacoustic tomography (TAT), in which one needs to reconstruct the initial value of a solution of the wave equation from its value on an observation surface. We show that if some geometric rays for the equation do not intersect the observation surface, the reconstruction in TAT is not Hölder stable.
We prove a uniqueness theorem for compactly supported initial data for the variable speed wave equation arising in models of thermoacoustic tomography, given measurements on a part of the boundary. The proof is based on domain of dependence arguments and D. Tataru's unique continuation theorem.
We derive an explicit method for reconstructing singularities of the initial data in a thermoacoustic tomography problem, in the case of variable sound speed and limited boundary data. In order to obtain this explicit formula we assume the metric induced by the sound speed does not have conjugate points inside the region to be observed.
We consider the mathematical model of photoacoustic and thermoacoustic tomography in media with a variable sound speed. When the sound speed is known, the explicit reconstruction formula by P. Stefanov and G. Uhlmann (Inverse Problems, 25(7):075011, 16, 2009) can be used. We study how a modelling error in the sound speed affects the reconstruction formula and quantify the effect in terms of a stability estimate.
The spectrum of the interior transmission problem is related to the unique determination of the acoustic properties of a body in thermoacoustic imaging. Under a non-trapping hypothesis, we show that sparsity of the interior transmission spectrum implies a range separation condition for the thermoacoustic operator. In odd dimension greater than or equal to three, we prove that the transmission spectrum for a pair of radially symmetric non-trapping sound speeds is countable, and conclude that the ranges of the associated thermoacoustic maps have only trivial intersection.
The time reversal method in thermoacoustic tomography is used for approximating the initial pressure inside a biological object using measurements of the pressure wave made on a surface surrounding the object. This article presents error estimates for the time reversal method in the cases of variable, non-trapping sound speeds.
In this article, we consider the inverse source problem arising in photoacoustic tomography in elastic media. We show that the time reversal method, proposed by Tittelfitz [Inverse Problems 28.5 (2012): 055004], converges with the sharp observation time without any constraint on the speeds of the longitudinal and shear waves.
We explore Thermoacoustic Tomography with circular integrating detectors assuming variable, smooth wave speed. We show that the measurement operator in this case is a Fourier Integral Operator and examine how the singularities in initial data and measured data are related through the canonical relation of this operator. We prove which of those singularities in the initial data are visible from a fixed open subset of the set on which measurements are taken. In addition, numerical results are shown for both full and partial data.
In this article we study the inverse problem of thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) on a medium with attenuation represented by a time- convolution (or memory) term, and whose consideration is motivated by the modeling of ultrasound waves in heterogeneous tissue via fractional derivatives with spatially dependent parameters. Under the assumption of being able to measure data on the whole boundary, we prove uniqueness and stability, and propose a convergent reconstruction method for a class of smooth variable sound speeds. By a suitable modification of the time reversal technique, we obtain a Neuma…
We explore the effect of sampling rates when measuring data given by $Mf$ for special operators $M$ arising in Thermoacoustic Tomography. We start with sampling requirements on $Mf$ given $f$ satisfying certain conditions. After this we discuss the resolution limit on $f$ posed by the sampling rate of $Mf$ without assuming any conditions on these sampling rates. Next we discuss aliasing artifacts when $Mf$ is known to be under sampled in one or more of its variables. Finally, we discuss averaging of measurement data and resulting aliasing and artifacts, along with a scheme for anti-aliasing.
We consider the inverse source problem of thermo- and photoacoustic tomography, with data registered on an open surface partially surrounding the source of acoustic waves. Under the assumption of constant speed of sound we develop an explicit non-iterative reconstruction procedure that recovers the Radon transform of the sought source, up to an infinitely smooth additive error term. The source then can be found by inverting the Radon transform. Our analysis is microlocal in nature and does not provide a norm estimate on the error in the so obtained image. However, numerical simulations show th…
This paper concerns thermoacoustic tomography and photoacoustic tomography, two couple-physics imaging modalities that attempt to combine the high resolution of ultrasound and the high contrast capabilities of electromagnetic waves. We give sufficient conditions to recover both the sound speed of the medium being probed and the source.
Practical applications of thermoacoustic tomography require numerical inversion of the spherical mean Radon transform with the centers of integration spheres occupying an open surface. Solution of this problem is needed (both in 2-D and 3-D) because frequently the region of interest cannot be completely surrounded by the detectors, as it happens, for example, in breast imaging. We present an efficient numerical algorithm for solving this problem in 2-D (similar methods are applicable in the 3-D case). Our method is based on the numerical approximation of plane waves by certain single layer pot…
We propose three fast algorithms for solving the inverse problem of the thermoacoustic tomography corresponding to certain acquisition geometries. Two of these methods are designed to process the measurements done with point-like detectors placed on a circle (in 2D) or a sphere (in 3D) surrounding the object of interest. The third inversion algorithm works with the data measured by the integrating line detectors arranged in a cylindrical assembly rotating around the object. The number of operations required by these techniques is equal to O(n^3 log n) and O(n^3 log^2 n) for the 3D techniques (…
In this paper we consider the linearized problem of recovering both the sound speed and the thermal absorption arising in thermoacoustic and photoacoustic tomography. We show that the problem is unstable in any scale of Sobolev spaces.
In thermoacoustic and photoacoustic tomography an electromagnetic wave is sent through a medium, heating it and therefore generating an elastic expansion that in turns generates an acoustic wave that is measured outside the medium. The general problem is to recover both the inhomogeneous sound speed and the initial pressure from the boundary measurements of the solution of the acoustic wave equation with a single measurement of the pressure. We show that one can recover both the sound speed and the initial pressure assuming a monocitiy condition on the sound speed that includes the physically …
The attenuation of ultrasound waves in photoacoustic and thermoacoustic imaging presents an important drawback in the applicability of these modalities. This issue has been addressed previously in the applied and theoretical literature, and some advances have been made on the topic. In particular, stability inequalities have been proposed for the inverse problem of initial source recovery with partial observations under the assumption of unique determination of the initial pressure. The main goal of this work is to fill this gap, this is, we prove the uniqueness property for the inverse proble…
We consider a mathematical model of thermoacoustic tomography and other multi-wave imaging techniques with variable sound speed and attenuation. We find that a Neumann series reconstruction algorithm, previously studied under the assumption of zero attenuation, still converges if attenuation is sufficiently small. With complete boundary data, we show the inverse problem has a unique solution, and modified time reversal provides a stable reconstruction. We also consider partial boundary data, and in this case study those singularities that can be stably recovered.
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging imaging modality that aims at measuring the high-contrast optical properties of tissues by means of high-resolution ultrasonic measurements. The interaction between these two types of waves is based on the thermoacoustic effect. In recent years, many works have investigated the applicability of compressed sensing to PAT, in order to reduce measuring times while maintaining a high reconstruction quality. However, in most cases, theoretical guarantees are missing. In this work, we show that in many measurement setups of practical interest, compressed…
Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a non-invasive imaging modality that requires recovering the initial data of the wave equation from certain measurements of the solution outside the object. In the standard PAT measurement setup, the used data consist of time-dependent signals measured on an observation surface. In contrast, the measured data from the recently invented full-field detection technique provide the solution of the wave equation on a spatial domain at a single instant in time. While reconstruction using classical PAT data has been extensively studied, not much is known for the full…
We study the problem of recovery the source $a(t,x)F(x)$ in the wave equation in anisotropic medium with $a$ known so that $a(0,x)\not=0$ with a single measurement. We use Carleman estimates combined with geometric arguments and give sharp conditions for uniqueness. We also study the non-linear problem of recovery the sound speed in the equation $u_{tt} -c^2(x)Δu =0$ with one measurement. We give sharp conditions for stability, as well. An application to thermoacoustic tomography is also presented.
In this article, we revisit iterative methods for solving the inverse problem of photoacoustic tomography in free space. Recently, there have been interesting developments on explicit formulations of the adjoint operator, demonstrating that iterative methods are an attractive choice for photoacoustic image reconstruction. In this work, we propose several modifications of current formulations of the adjoint operator which help speed up the convergence and yield improved error estimates. We establish a stability analysis and show that, with our choices of the adjoint operator, the iterative meth…
We study the inverse problem of determining both the source of a wave and its speed inside a medium from measurements of the solution of the wave equation on the boundary. This problem arises in photoacoustic and thermoacoustic tomography, and has important applications in medical imaging. We prove that if the solutions of the wave equation with the source and sound speed $(f_1,c_1)$ and $(f_2,c_2)$ agree on the boundary of a bounded region $Ω$, then \[ \int_Ω(c_2^{-2}-c_1^{-2})φdy=0,\] for every harmonic function $φ\in C(\barΩ)$, which holds without any knowledge of the source. We also show t…
We consider an inverse boundary value problem for a model time-harmonic equation of acoustic tomography of moving fluid with variable current velocity, sound speed, density and absorption. In the present article it is assumed that at fixed frequency the coefficients of this equation are already recovered modulo an appropriate gauge transformation using some reconstruction method from boundary measurements presented in the literature. Our main result consists in formulas and equations that allow to get rid of this gauge non-uniqueness and recover the fluid parameters using boundary measurements…
