Simultaneous reconstruction of absorption, scattering and anisotropy factor distributions in quantitative photoacoustic tomography.

We present for the first time the simultaneous reconstruction of three optical parameters distributions of biological tissues namely, the absorption μ and scattering μ coefficients, as well as the anisotropy factor g of the Henyey-Greenstein phase function as a new optical contrast. The 2D images are obtained from the simulation experiments and multi-source quantitative photoacoustic tomography with the radiative transfer equation (RTE) as light transport model. The image reconstruction method is based on a gradient-based optimization scheme. The adjoint method applied to the RTE is used to efficiently compute the gradient of the objective function. The results show simultaneous reconstructions of the three optical properties even with noisy data. The crosstalk problem between the three parameters is highlighted. Superior quality images are obtained for μ compared to those of μ and g. Moreover, our algorithm allows reconstructing inserts-like heterogeneities with very good spatial resolution and qualitative accuracy.