Quantitative photoacoustic imaging of two-photon absorption

Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a hybrid imaging modality where we intend to reconstruct optical properties of heterogeneous media from measured ultrasound signals generated by the photoacoustic effect. In recent years, there have been considerable interests in using PAT to image two-photon absorption, in addition to the usual single-photon absorption, inside diffusive media. We present a mathematical model for quantitative image reconstruction in two-photon photoacoustic tomography (TP-PAT). We propose a computational strategy for the reconstruction of the optical absorption coefficients and provide some numerical evidences based on synthetic photoacoustic acoustic data to demonstrate the feasibility of quantitative reconstructions in TP-PAT.

Keywords: hybrid imaging; hybrid inverse problems; image reconstruction; nonlinear diffusion equation; numerical optimization; photoacoustic tomography; two-photon absorption.