A Transport Model for Multi-Frequency Acousto-Optic Tomography

Abstract: In a medium where the dielectric permittivity is perturbed in the presence of an acoustic wave, optical scattering generates frequency-shifted light. In this paper we consider the inverse problem of recovering the optical properties of this medium from measurements of the frequency-shifted light, using a radiative transport equation (RTE) model for light propagation. Given some assumptions on the regularity and isotropicity of the coefficients of the RTE, we show that the absorption coefficient can be reconstructed from the boundary measurements of a single well chosen illumination, and that the scattering coefficients can be reconstructed from boundary measurements of a one-parameter family of illuminations.