Half-time image reconstruction in thermoacoustic tomography

Abstract—Thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) is an emerging imaging technique with great potential for a wide range of biomedical imaging applications. In this paper, we propose and investigate reconstruction approaches for TAT that are based on the half-time reflectivity tomography paradigm. We reveal that half-time reconstruction approaches permit for the explicit control of statistically complementary information that can result in the optimal reduction of image variances. We also show that half-time reconstruction approaches can mitigate image artifacts due to het-erogeneous acoustic properties of an object. Reconstructed images and numerical results produced from simulated and experimental TAT measurement data are employed to demonstrate these effects. Index Terms—Image reconstruction, photoacoustic tomog-raphy, reflectivity tomography, spherical Radon transform, thermoacoustic tomography. I