Quantitative photoacoustic tomography augmented with surface light measurements.

Quantitative photoacoustic tomography is an imaging modality in which distributions of optical parameters inside tissue are estimated from photoacoustic images. This optical parameter estimation is an ill-posed problem and it needs to be approached in the framework of inverse problems. In this work, utilising surface light measurements in quantitative photoacoustic tomography is studied. Estimation of absorption and scattering is formulated as a minimisation problem utilising both internal quantitative photoacoustic data and surface light data. The image reconstruction problem is studied with two-dimensional numerical simulations in various imaging situations using the diffusion approximation as the model for light propagation. The results show that quantitative photoacoustic tomography augmented with surface light data can improve both absorption and scattering estimates when compared to the conventional quantitative photoacoustic tomography.