Multispectral reconstruction methods for quantitative photoacoustic tomography

We propose a novel multispectral reconstruction-classification method for simultaneously recovering absorption and scattering coefficients from images of absorbed optical energy. In contrast with pre-existing chromophore reconstruction methods, this approach does not require prior knowledge of the characteristic spectra of the absorbers, which is not always available. Numerical experiments performed on anatomically realistic 3D phantoms show that this approach allows for improved recovery of both the optical absorption and scattering with respect to reconstruction-only methods, and accurate classification of chromophores of clinical interest.