Reconstruction-classification method for quantitative photoacoustic tomography

We propose a combined reconstruction-classification method for simultaneously recovering absorption and scattering in turbid media from images of absorbed optical energy. This method exploits knowledge that optical parameters are determined by a limited number of classes to iteratively improve their estimate. Numerical experiments show that the proposed approach allows for accurate recovery of absorption and scattering in 2 and 3 dimensions, and delivers superior image quality with respect to traditional reconstruction-only approaches.