Microlocally accurate solution of the inverse source problem of thermoacoustic tomography

Abstract

We consider the inverse source problem of thermo- and photoacoustic tomography, with data registered on an open surface partially surrounding the source of acoustic waves. Under the assumption of constant speed of sound we develop an explicit non-iterative reconstruction procedure that recovers the Radon transform of the sought source, up to an infinitely smooth additive error term. The source then can be found by inverting the Radon transform. Our analysis is microlocal in nature and does not provide a norm estimate on the error in the so obtained image. However, numerical simulations show that this error is quite small in practical terms. We also present an asymptotically fast implementation of this procedure for the case when the data are given on a circular arc in 2D.