Photoacoustic imaging and Thermodynamic Attenuation
Sebastian Acosta, Baylor College of Medicine

Abstract:
We investigate the mathematical well-posedness and limitations of photoacoustic tomography. This is an emerging imaging modality that combines two types of physical fields to obtain both high contrast and high resolution. The propagation of acoustic waves is coupled to the heat equation for the excess temperature due to the thermal expansivity of the medium. For photoacoustic tomography, we seek to recover the initial acoustic profile from knowledge of acoustic boundary measurements. From the theoretical point of view, we investigate whether the thermodynamic coupling affects the uniqueness/stability of the reconstruction. We will discuss theoretical challenges and implementation of numerical reconstruction algorithms.