How to position sensors in thermo-acoustic tomography

Thermo-acoustic tomography is a non-invasive medical imaging technique: the object to be reconstructed is excited by an impulse, inducing inhomogeneous heating and thus tissue expansion. This creates an acoustic wave pressure that can be measured by sensors. The reconstruction of internal heterogeneities can then be achieved by solving an inverse problem, once the sound wave measurements are known outside the body. As the measured pressure intensity is expected to be low, a difficult problem is to position the sensors properly.