In this thesis, we analyse tomographic imaging of subsurface absorbing structures in tissue phantoms based on pulsed photothermal radiometry (PPTR). This experimental technique consists of illuminating the sample with a laser pulse and measuring its infrared (IR) radiation. From spatially resolved measurements of the transient radiation with a fast IR camera, the initial three-dimensional temperature field in the sample can be reconstructed by solving the inverse problem of thermal diffusion and radiation. The so-called photothermal tomography (PTT) enables tomographic imaging of subsurface absorbing structures in strongly scattering samples. We test the technique on agarose gel tissue phantoms with optical scatterers and subsurface cylindrical absorbers ⠼ 100 μm in diameter, which mimic blood vessels in the superficial layers of the skin. We present the experimental method and a novel protocol for pre-processing the measurements which reduces errors due to minor variations in temperature and emissivity of the sample. By removing the first 20 ms of the radiometric record, we remove artefacts originating from the error in the radiometric temperature measurement of a sample with an inhomogeneous depth temperature profile. We show that progressive quadratic binning of radiometric images enables a tenfold reduction in computational time without adverse effects on image quality. A small increase of thermal diffusivity in the model reduces temperature field deformations due to blurred radiometric images. By subtracting the signal from the reference window, we remove the correlated part of the IR camera noise and the contribution to the signals due to the small homogeneous temperature rise of the sample. This procedure allows robust localisation of subsurface absorbing structures at depths up to 1 mm without disturbing artefacts, even in cases where the signal-to-noise ratio is close to 1. We apply a progressive discretization of the temperature field in the axial direction to approximate the speed of convergence of structures at different depths.
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