@article{paltauf02a,
  author = {G. Paltaulf and J. A. Viator and S. A. Prahl and S. L. Jacques},
  title = {Iterative Reconstruction Method for Three-Dimensional Optoacoustic Imaging},
  journal = {Journal of Acoustic Society of America},
  year = {2002},
  volume = {112},
  pages = {1536--1544},
  abstract = {Optoacoustic imaging is based on the generation of thermoelastic stress waves by heating an optically heterogeneous medium with a short laser pulse. The stress waves contain information about the distribution of structures with preferential optical absorption. Detection of the waves with an array of broadband ultrasound detectors at the surface of the medium and applying a back projection algorithm is used to create a map of absorbed energy inside the medium. With conventional reconstruction methods a large number of detector elements and filtering of the signals are necessary to reduce back projection artifacts. As an alternative this study proposes an iterative procedure. The algorithm is designed to minimize the error between measured signals and signals calculated from the reconstructed image. In experiments using broadband optical ultrasound detectors and in simulations the algorithm was used to obtain three-dimensional images of multiple optoacoustic sources. With signals from a planar array of 3 x 3 detector elements a significant improvement was observed after about 10 iterations compared to the simple radial back projection. Compared to conventional methods using filtered back projection, the iterative method is computationally more intensive but requires less time and instrumentation for signal acquisition.},
}