The Optical Inverse Problem in Quantitative Photoacoustic Tomography: A Review

Photoacoustic tomography is a fast-growing biomedical imaging modality that combines rich optical contrast with a high acoustic resolution, at depths in tissues. Building upon the foundation of this technique, novel quantitative photoacoustic tomography fully leverages its advantages while further delivering improved quantification capabilities to produce high-accuracy concentration estimates, which has attracted substantial research interest in recent years. The kernel challenge associated with quantitative photoacoustic tomography is an optical inverse problem aiming to recover the absorption coefficient distribution from the conventional photoacoustic image. Although the crucial importance of the optical inversion has been widely acknowledged, achieving it has remained a persistent challenge due to the inherent non-linearity and non-uniqueness. In the past decade, numerous methods were proposed and have made noticeable progress in addressing this concern. Nevertheless, a review has been conspicuously absent for a long time. Aiming to bridge this gap, the present study comprehensively investigates the recent research in this field, and methods identified with significant value are introduced in this paper. Moreover, all included methods are systematically classified based on their underlying principles. Finally, we summarize each category and highlight its remaining challenges and potential future research directions.