Explicit Reconstructions in QPAT, QTAT, TE, and MRE

Abstract

Photo-acoustic Tomography (PAT) and Thermo-acoustic Tomography (TAT) are medical imaging modalities that combine the high contrast of radiative properties of tissues with the high resolution of ultrasound. In both modalities, a first step concerns the reconstruction of the radiation-induced source of ultrasound. Transient Elastography (TE) and Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) combine the high elastic contrast of tissues with the high resolution of ultrasound and magnetic resonance, respectively. In both modalities, a first step concerns the reconstruction of the elastic displacement. The result of this first step, which is not considered in this paper, is the availability of internal functionals of the unknown tissue properties. All imaging modalities are recast as the reconstruction of parameters in elliptic equations from knowledge of solutions to such equations. This paper provides a characterization of the parameters that may or may not be reconstructed from such internal functionals. We provide explicit reconstruction procedures and indicate how stable they are with respect to errors in the available measurements. The modalities PAT, TAT, TE, and MRE allow us to reconstruct high-contrast optical and elastic properties of tissues with the high resolution of ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging. They provide a means to reconstruct second-order tensors modeling tissue anisotropy as well as complex-valued coefficients modeling absorbing and dissipative effects.