Pulsed-microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography: filtered backprojection in a circular measurement configuration.

Our study on pulsed-microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography in biological tissues is presented. A filtered backprojection algorithm based on rigorous theory is used to reconstruct the cross-sectional image from a thermoacoustic measurement in a circular configuration that encloses the sample under study. Specific details describing the measurement of thermoacoustic waves and the implementation of the reconstruction algorithm are discussed. A two-dimensional (2D) phantom sample with 2 mm features can be imaged faithfully. Through numerical simulation, the full width half-maximum (FWHM) of the point-spread function (PSF) is calculated to estimate the spatial resolution. The results demonstrate that the circular measurement configuration combined with the filtered backprojection method is a promising technique for detecting small tumors buried in biological tissues by utilizing microwave absorption contrast and ultrasound spatial resolution (approximately mm).