Exterior inverse problem for the circular means transform (CMT) arises in the intravascular photoacoustic imaging (IVPA), in the intravascular ultrasound imaging (IVUS), as well as in radar and sonar. The reduction of the IPVA to the CMT is quite str
aightforward. As shown in the paper, in IVUS the circular means can be recovered from measurements by solving a certain Volterra integral equation. Thus, a tomography reconstruction in both modalities requires solving the exterior problem for the CMT. Numerical solution of this problem usually is not attempted due to the presence of invisible wavefronts, which results in severe instability of the reconstruction. The novel inversion algorithm proposed in this paper yields a stable partial reconstruction: it reproduces the visible part of the image and blurs the invisible part. If the image contains little or no invisible wavefronts (as frequently happens in the IVPA and IVUS) the reconstruction is quantitatively accurate. The presented numerical simulations demonstrate the feasibility of tomography-like reconstruction in these modalities.
