This paper is a review of recent mathematical and computational advances in optical tomography. We discuss the physical foundations of forward models for light propagation on microscopic, mesoscopic and macroscopic scales. We also consider direct and numerical approaches to the inverse problems that arise at each of these scales. Finally, we outline future directions and open problems in the field.
We establish results for the injectivity and injectivity modulo gauge of certain inverse source problems in transport on a simply connected domain with variable index of refraction inducing a 'simple geometry'. The model given by radiative transfer involves a scattering kernel with finite harmonic content in the deviation angle. The results on injectivity are constructive, and they are connected to the explicit inversion (modulo kernel) of the attenuated X-ray transform on tensor fields on simple Riemannian surfaces.
Fluorescent Optical Tomography (FOT) is a new bio-medical imaging method with wider industrial applications. It is currently intensely researched since it is very precise and with no side effects for humans, as it uses non-ionising red and infrared light. Mathematically, FOT can be modelled as an inverse parameter identification problem, associated with a coupled elliptic system with Robin boundary conditions. Herein we utilise novel methods of Calculus of Variations in $L^\infty$ to lay the mathematical foundations of FOT which we pose as a PDE-constrained minimisation problem in $L^p$ and $L…
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…
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 deal with the problem of determining the shape of an inclusion embedded in a homogenous background medium. The multifre-quency electrical impedance tomography is used to image the inclusion. For different frequencies, a current is injected at the boundary and the resulting potential is measured. It turns out that the potential solves an elliptic equation in divergence form with discontinuous leading coefficient. For this inverse problem we aim to establish a logarithmic type stability estimate. The key point in our analysis consists in reducing the original problem to that of determining an…
This paper surveys inverse problems arising in several coupled-physics imaging modalities for both medical and geophysical purposes. These include Photo-acoustic Tomography (PAT), Thermo-acoustic Tomography (TAT), Electro-Seismic Conversion, Transient Elastrography (TE) and Acousto-Electric Tomography (AET). These inverse problems typically consists of multiple inverse steps, each of which corresponds to one of the wave propagations involved. The review focus on those steps known as the inverse problems with internal data, in which the complex geometrical optics (CGO) solutions to the underlyi…
This paper is concerned with robust preconditioning of wave equations constrained linear inverse problems from boundary observation data. The main result of this paper is a concept for regularization parameter robust preconditioning. Analogous concepts have been developed for control problems based on elliptic partial equations before.
In this paper we provide a mathematical model for imaging an anisotropic, orthotropic medium with Polarization-Sensitive Optical Coherence Tomography (PS-OCT). The imaging problem is formulated as an inverse scattering problem in three dimensions for reconstructing the electrical susceptibility of the medium using Maxwell's equations. Our reconstruction method is based on the second-order Born-approximation of the electric field.
This work considers properties of the logarithm of the Neumann-to-Dirichlet boundary map for the conductivity equation in a Lipschitz domain. It is shown that the mapping from the (logarithm of) the conductivity, i.e. the (logarithm of) the coefficient in the divergence term of the studied elliptic partial differential equation, to the logarithm of the Neumann-to-Dirichlet map is continuously Fréchet differentiable between natural topologies. Moreover, for any essentially bounded perturbation of the conductivity, the Fréchet derivative defines a bounded linear operator on the space of square i…
Ultrasound modulated bioluminescence tomography (UMBLT) is an imaging method which can be formulated as a hybrid inverse source problem. In the regime where light propagation is modeled by a radiative transfer equation, previous approaches to this problem require large numbers of optical measurements [10]. Here we propose an alternative solution for this inverse problem which requires only a single optical measurement in order to reconstruct the isotropic source. Specifically, we derive two inversion formulae based on Neumann series and Fredholm theory respectively, and prove their convergence…
Quantitative image reconstruction in photoacoustic tomography requires the solution of a coupled physics inverse problem involvier light transport and acoustic wave propagation. In this paper we address this issue employing the radiative transfer equation as accurate model for light transport. As main theoretical results, we derive several stability and uniqueness results for the linearized inverse problem. We consider the case of single illumination as well as the case of multiple illuminations assuming full or partial data. The numerical solution of the linearized problem is much less costly…
Scattering from a non-smooth random field on the time domain is studied for plane waves that propagate simultaneously through the potential in variable angles. We first derive sufficient conditions for stochastic moments of the field to be recovered from correlations between amplitude measurements of the leading singularities, detected in the exterior of a region where the potential is almost surely supported. The result is then applied to show that if two sufficiently regular random fields yield the same data, they have identical laws as function-valued random variables.
We consider the reconstruction of the diffusion and absorption coefficients of the diffusion equation from the internal information of the solution obtained from the first step of the inverse photoacoustic tomography (PAT). In practice, the internal information is only partially provided near the boundary due to the high absorption property of the medium and the limitation of the equipment. Our main contribution is to prove a Hölder stability of the inverse problem in a subregion where the internal information is reliably provided based on the stability estimation of a Cauchy problem satisfied…
In this paper, we consider the inverse problem of recovering a diffusion and absorption coefficients in steady-state optical tomography problem from the Neumann-to-Dirichlet map. We first prove a Global uniqueness and Lipschitz stability estimate for the absorption parameter provided that the diffusion is known. Then, we prove a Lipschitz stability result for simultaneous recovery of diffusion and absorption. In both cases the parameters belong to a known finite subspace with a priori known bounds. The proofs relies on a monotonicity result combined with the techniques of localized potentials.…
The multifrequency electrical impedance tomography is considered in order to image a conductivity inclusion inside a homogeneous background medium by injecting one current. An original spectral decomposition of the solution of the forward conductivity problem is used to retrieve the Cauchy data corresponding to the extreme case of perfect conductor. Using results based on the unique continuation we then prove the uniqueness of multifrequency electrical impedance tomography and obtain rigorous stability estimates. Our results in this paper are quite surprising in inverse conductivity problem si…
We study an inverse initial source problem that models Photoacoustic tomography measurements with array detectors, and introduce a method that can be viewed as a modification of the so called back and forth nudging method. We show that the method converges at an exponential rate under a natural visibility condition, with data given only on a part of the boundary of the domain of wave propagation. In this paper we consider the case of noiseless measurements.
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…
This work considers the time-domain fluorescence diffuse optical tomography (FDOT). We recover the distribution of fluorophores in biological tissue by the boundary measurements. With the Laplace transform and the knowledge of complex analysis, we build the uniqueness theorem of this inverse problem. After that, the numerical reconstructions are considered. We introduce a non-iterative inversion strategy by peak detection and an iterative inversion algorithm under the framework of regularizing scheme, then give several numerical examples in three-dimensional space illustrating the performance …
Uniqueness of solutions in high-energy x-ray based `eigenstrain tomography' and other inverse eigenstrain problems: Counter examples and necessary conditions for well-posedness
We summarize the proofs for the s-injectivity of the tensor tomography problem on compact Riemannian manifolds with boundaries in [Dairbekov, Inverse Problems, 22: 431, 2006] and [Paternain-Salo-Uhlmann, Math. Ann., 363: 305-362, 2015] under certain geometric assumptions.
We consider a general setting for dynamic tensor field tomography in an inhomogeneous refracting and absorbing medium as inverse source problem for the associated transport equation. Following Fermat's principle the Riemannian metric in the considered domain is generated by the refractive index of the medium. There is wealth of results for the inverse problem of recovering a tensor field from its longitudinal ray transform in a static euclidean setting, whereas there are only few inversion formulas and algorithms existing for general Riemannian metrics and time-dependent tensor fields. It is a…
We present a general framework to study uniqueness, stability and reconstruction for infinite-dimensional inverse problems when only a finite-dimensional approximation of the measurements is available. For a large class of inverse problems satisfying Lipschitz stability we show that the same estimate holds even with a finite number of measurements. We also derive a globally convergent reconstruction algorithm based on the Landweber iteration. This theory applies to nonlinear ill-posed problems such as electrical impedance tomography, inverse scattering and quantitative photoacoustic tomography…
This PhD dissertation is concerned with integral geometric inverse problems. The geodesic ray transform is an operator that encodes the line integrals of a function along geodesics. The dissertation establishes many conditions when such information determines a function uniquely and stably. A new numerical model for computed tomography imaging is created as a part of the dissertation. The introductory part of the dissertation contains an introduction to inverse problems and mathematical models associated to computed tomography. The main focus is in definitions of integral geometry problems, su…
We consider the impedance tomography problem in the plane. Using Bukhgeim's scattering data for the Dirac problem, we prove that the conductivity is uniquely determined by the Dirichlet-to-Neuman map
Inverse transport problems in quantitative PAT for molecular imaging
荧光光声层析成像（fluorescence photoacoustic tomography，fPAT）是一种将荧光成像与光声层析成像相结合的分子成像技术，可获得异质介质内部荧光分布的高分辨率成像。这项工作的目的是研究反问题的定量步骤fPAT，我们打算重建的辐射输运方程的耦合系统使用内部数据从超声测量恢复的物理系数。我们得到的唯一性和稳定性的反问题的结果，并开发了一些有效的算法，图像重建。基于合成数据的数值模拟验证了理论分析。本文的结果补充了[Ren-Zhao，SIAM J. Imag.科学，[2013]在同一个问题上，但在扩散制度。
