Image reconstruction in optoacoustic tomography accounting for frequency-dependent attenuation

In this work, we show how to incorporate attenuation into the optoacoustic tomography (OAT) imaging equation and develop a strategy for compensating for this attenuation during image reconstruction. In OAT, one exposes a sample to pulses of electromagnetic radiation that cause small amounts of heating in the specimen. The heating engenders thermal expansion which, in turn, gives rise to acoustic waves. The resulting acoustic pressure signal is generally measured by transducers arrayed around the object, and these data may be used to reconstruct images of the original electromagnetic absorption. Frequency-dependent absorption of the acoustic waves can lead to blurring and distortion in reconstructed images. We show that in the temporal frequency domain, the optoacoustic wave equation incorporating attenuation is equivalent to the inhomogeneous Helmholtz equation with a complex wave number. While some work has been done in other fields on directly solving Helmholtz equations with complex wave numbers, these are generally computationally intensive numerical approaches. We pursue a different approach, deriving an integral equation that relates the temporal optoacoustic signal at a given transducer location in the presence of attenuation to the ideal signal that would have been obtained in the absence of attenuation. This equation is readily discretized and the resulting linear system of equations involves a matrix that need only be inverted once, at which point the inverse can be used to correct all of the measured time signals prior to reconstruction by conventional methods.