The development and investigation of PACT as an effective neuroimaging modality is highly warranted. Amajor challenge in transcranial PACT brain imaging is to compensate for aberrations in the measured datadue to the propagation of the photoacoustic wavefields through the skull. To properly account for these effects,image reconstruction methods in transcranial PACT require knowledge of the spatial distribution of the acousticparameters of the skull. However, estimating the spatial distribution of the acoustic parameters of the skullremains challenging. Inspired by our observation that information about the distribution of skull acousticparameters is encoded in PACT measurements, we propose to jointly reconstruct the initial pressure distributionand the spatial distributions of the acoustic parameters of the skull from PACT data alone. In this study, weimplement a joint image reconstruction algorithm to estimate both the initial pressure distribution as well asthe spatial distribution of the acoustic parameters of the skull for 3D transcranial PACT. The joint estimationof the initial pressure and spatial distributions of the acoustic parameters of the skull from PACT data alone isunstable. To overcome this instability, we propose to incorporate prior information about the acoustic propertiesof the skull from adjunct image data. The developed joint reconstruction algorithm is validated and investigatedthrough computer-simulation studies.
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