2009 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. Thermoacoustic tomography (TAT) employs the well-known [1-4] correlation between electromagnetic (EM) absorption of biological tissue and its physiological and pathological properties. To employ this contrast mechanism, a biological object is irradiated by a brief EM pulse, and the resulting thermoacoustic signals from the tissue are collected by ultrasound transducers to map the distribution of the radiation absorption within the sample (e.g., Refs. [5-9]). TAT thus combines the good spatial resolution of ultrasound imaging with the good contrast in EM absorption.
