Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 May 2018
This paper is concerned with the stability issue in determining absorption and diffusion coefficients in photoacoustic imaging. Assuming that the medium is layered and the acoustic wave speed is known, we derive global Hölder stability estimates of the photoacoustic inversion. These results show that the reconstruction is stable in the region close to the optical illumination source, and deteriorate exponentially far away. Several experimental pointed out that the resolution depth of the photoacoustic modality is about tens of millimeters. Our stability estimates confirm these observations and give a rigorous quantification of this depth resolution.
The research of FT was supported in part by grant LabEx PERSYVAL-Lab (ANR-11-LABX-0025-01) and grant ANR-17-CE40-0029 of the French National Research Agency ANR (project MultiOnde).