Quantitative PAT with simplified $P_N$ approximation

Abstract: The photoacoustic tomography (PAT) is a hybrid modality that combines the optics and acoustics to obtain high resolution and high contrast imaging of heterogeneous media. In this work, our objective is to study the inverse problem in the quantitative step of PAT which aims to reconstruct the optical coefficients of the governing radiative transport equation from the ultrasound measurements. In our analysis, we take the simplified $P_N$ approximation of the radiative transport equation as the physical model and then show the uniqueness and stability for this modified inverse problem. Numerical simulations based on synthetic data are presented to validate our analysis.