Standard source method in passive acoustic thermal tomography

Potentialities of passive acoustic thermal tomography in reconstructing the 2D temperature distribution in a human body are studied. Special attention is given to the estimation of the maximal temperature value. A method for its exact reconstruction is proposed. The method uses the assumption that the temperature distribution is formed by a local heat source and is based on the selection of the parameters of such a source by the minimization of the residual of the measured and hypothetical values of the acoustic brightness temperature. The accuracy of the determination of the maximal in-depth temperature by different methods is analyzed by numerical simulation. It is demonstrated that the proposed method provides a higher accuracy than Tikhonov’s methods of global and local regularization, especially with a heat source at great depth. The proposed method is shown to cause no systematic error in the reconstruction of temperature peaks at great depth. The possibility of reconstructing a two-peak temperature distribution by the proposed method is demonstrated.