A least-squares fixed-point iterative algorithm for multiple illumination photoacoustic tomography.

The optical absorption of tissues provides important information for clinical and pre-clinical studies. The challenge in recovering optical absorption from photoacoustic images is that the measured pressure depends on absorption and local fluence. One reconstruction approach uses a fixed-point iterative technique based on minimizing the mean-squared error combined with modeling of the light source to determine optical absorption. With this technique, convergence is not guaranteed even with an accurate measure of optical scattering. In this work we demonstrate using simulations that a new multiple illumination least squares fixed-point iteration algorithm improves convergence - even with poor estimates of optical scattering.