Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is an emerging biomedical imaging modality which exploits the photoacoustic effect, whereby light absorption gives rise to ultrasound waves. It is already being used in a number of applications, such as preclinical and breast imaging, and for cancer and drug research. There are two inverse problems in PAT : an acoustic inversion and a diffuse optical inversion, which can be decoupled because of the differences in the timescale of acoustic and optical propagation. A great deal of work has been done on the former, and progress has been made on the latter in recent years. However, there remain several open image reconstruction problems of considerable practical importance, both acoustic and optical. This talk will give an overview of PAT , describe the various experimental systems available for making PAT measurements, highlight the progress made to date, and introduce some remaining unsolved inverse problems of interest.