Abstract. In photoacoustic tomography (PAT), a hybrid imaging modality that is based on the acoustic detection of optical absorption from biological tissue exposed to a pulsed laser, a short pulse laser generates an initial pressure proportional to the absorbed optical energy, which then propagates acoustically and is measured on the boundary. To account for the significant signal distortion caused by acoustic attenuation in biological tissue, we model PAT in heterogeneous media using a damped wave equation featuring spatially varying sound speed and a time-dependent damping term. Under natural assumptions, we show that the initial pressure is uniquely determined by the boundary measurements using a harmonic extension of the boundary data with energy decay. For constant damping, an expansion in Dirichlet eigenfunctions of [Formula: see text] leads to an explicit series reconstruction formula for the initial pressure. Finally, we develop a gradient free numerical method based on the Pontryagin’s maximum principle to provide a robust and computationally viable approach to image reconstruction in attenuating PAT.

Abstract. Photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a novel and promising technology in hybrid medical imaging that involves generating acoustic waves in the object of interest by stimulating electromagnetic energy. The acoustic wave is measured outside the object. One of the key mathematical problems in PAT is the reconstruction of the initial function that contains diagnostic information from the solution of the wave equation on the surface of the acoustic transducers. Herein, we propose a wave forward operator that assigns an initial function to obtain the solution of the wave equation on a unit sphere. Under the assumption of the radial variable speed of ultrasound, we obtain the singular value decomposition of this wave forward operator by determining the orthonormal basis of a certain Hilbert space comprising eigenfunctions. In addition, numerical simulation results obtained using the continuous Galerkin method are utilized to validate the inversion resulting from the singular value decomposition.

Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is a well-established clinical tool for functional imaging. A limitation of current SPECT systems is the use of mechanical collimation, where only a small fraction of the emitted photons are actually used for image reconstruction. This results in a large noise level and finally in a limited spatial resolution. In order to decrease the noise level and to increase the imaging resolution, Compton cameras have been proposed as an alternative to mechanical collimators. Image reconstruction in SPECT with Compton cameras yields the problem of recovering a marker distribution from integrals over conical surfaces. Due to this and other applications, such conical Radon transforms recently got significant attention. In the current paper we consider the case where the cones of integration have vertices on a circular cylinder and axis pointing to the symmetry axis of the cylinder. Our setup does not use all emitted photons but a much larger fraction than systems based on mechanical collimation. Further, it may be simpler to be fabricated than a Compton camera system collecting full five-dimensional data. As main theoretical results in this paper we derive analytic reconstruction methods for the considered transform. We also investigate the V-line transform with vertices on a circle and symmetry axis orthogonal to the circle, which arises in the special case where the absorber distribution is located in a horizontal plane.

A Compton camera has been suggested for use in single photon emission computed tomography because a conventional gamma camera has low efficiency. Here we consider a cone transform brought about by a Compton camera with line detectors. A cone transform takes a given function on the 3-dimensional space and assigns to it the surface integral of the function over cones determined by the 1-dimensional vertex space, the 1-dimensional central axis, and the 1-dimensional opening angle. We generalize this cone transform to $n$-dimensional space and provide an inversion formula. Also, numerical simulations are presented to demonstrate our suggested algorithm in three dimensions.

The performance of a time division multiple access (TDMA) based wireless mesh network (WMN) depends highly on the broadcast scheduling algorithm (BSA) applied. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the required throughput of a node is based on the amount of packets generated at that node and also the packets that need to be relayed through the node. Therefore, depending on the node's position within the WMN, nodes will have different throughput requirements. In order to quantify the required throughput of a node, the metric transmission demand (TD) is defined and a TD based BSA is proposed. Second, a TD based channel utilization metric named transmission efficiency is introduced and a modified way to use the Pollaczek-Khintchine (P-K) formula is also proposed to include the influence of TD in average delay computations. Results demonstrate that the proposed BSA is scalable and provides higher throughput and less average delay compared to other BSAs.