A high contrast and resolution reconstruction algorithm in quantitative photoacoustic tomography

A framework for reconstruction of optical diffusion and absorption coefficients in quantitative photoacoustic tomography is presented. This framework is based on a Tikhonov-type functional with a regularization term promoting sparsity of the absorption coefficient and a prior involving a Kubelka-Munk absorption-diffusion relation that allows to obtain superior reconstructions. The reconstruction problem is formulated as the minimization of this functional subject to the differential constraint given by a photon-propagation model. The solution of this problem is obtained by a fast and robust sequential quadratic hamiltonian algorithm based on the Pontryagin maximum principle. Results of several numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed computational strategy is able to obtain reconstructions of the optical coefficients with high contrast and resolution for a wide variety of objects.