Hybrid inverse problems for a system of Maxwell's equations

This paper concerns the quantitative step of the medical imaging modality thermo-acoustic tomography (TAT). We model the radiation propagation by a system of Maxwell's equations. We show that the index of refraction of light and the absorption coefficient (conductivity) can be uniquely and stably reconstructed from a sufficiently large number of TAT measurements. Our method is based on verifying that the linearization of the inverse problem forms a redundant elliptic system of equations. We also observe that the reconstructions are qualitatively quite different from the setting where radiation is modeled by a scalar Helmholtz equation as in Bal G et al (2011 Inverse Problems 27 055007). (paper)