Acoustic vector tomography and its application to magnetoacoustic tomography with magnetic induction (MAT-MI)

A new tomographic algorithm for reconstructing a curl-free vector field, whose divergence serves as acoustic source is proposed. It is shown that under certain conditions, the scalar acoustic measurements obtained from a surface enclosing the source area can be vectorized according to the known measurement geometry and then be used to reconstruct the vector field. The proposed method is validated by numerical experiments. This method can be easily applied to magnetoacoustic tomography with magnetic induction (MAT-MI). A simulation study of applying this method to MAT-MI shows that compared to existing methods, the proposed method can give an accurate estimation of the induced current distribution and a better reconstruction of electrical conductivity within an object.