A sparsity-based nonlinear reconstruction method for two-photon photoacoustic tomography
Abstract
We present a new nonlinear optimization approach for the sparse reconstruction of single-photon absorption and two-photon absorption coefficients in photoacoustic tomography (PAT). This framework comprises of minimizing an objective functional involving a least squares fit of the interior pressure field data corresponding to two boundary source functions, where the absorption coefficients and the photon density are related through a semi-linear elliptic partial differential equation (PDE) arising in PAT. Further, the objective functional consists of an L1 regularization term that promotes sparsity patterns in absorption coefficients. The motivation for this framework primarily comes from some recent works related to solving inverse problems in acousto-electric tomography and current density impedance tomography. We provide a new proof of existence and uniqueness of a solution to the semi-linear PDE. Further, a proximal method, involving a Picard solver for the semi-linear PDE and its adjoint, is used to solve the optimization problem. Several numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.