Pulsed‐microwave‐induced thermoacoustic tomography: Filtered backprojection in a circular measurement configuration

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Abstract
Our study on pulsed‐microwave‐induced thermoacoustic tomography in biological tissues is presented. A filtered backprojection algorithm based on rigorous theory is used to reconstruct the cross‐sectional image from a thermoacoustic measurement in a circular configuration that encloses the sample under study. Specific details describing the measurement of thermoacoustic waves and the implementation of the reconstruction algorithm are discussed. A two‐dimensional (2D) phantom sample with 2 mm features can be imaged faithfully. Through numerical simulation, the full width half‐maximum (FWHM) of the point‐spread function (PSF) is calculated to estimate the spatial resolution. The results demonstrate that the circular measurement configuration combined with the filtered backprojection method is a promising technique for detecting small tumors buried in biological tissues by utilizing microwave absorption contrast and ultrasound spatial resolution (∼mm).