Half-time image reconstruction in thermoacoustic tomography

Thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) is an emerging imaging technique with great potential for a wide range of biomedical imaging applications. In this paper, we propose and investigate reconstruction approaches for TAT that are based on the half-time reflectivity tomography paradigm. We reveal that half-time reconstruction approaches permit for the explicit control of statistically complementary information that can result in the optimal reduction of image variances. We also show that half-time reconstruction approaches can mitigate image artifacts due to heterogeneous acoustic properties of an object. Reconstructed images and numerical results produced from simulated and experimental TAT measurement data are employed to demonstrate these effects.