  Practical applications of thermoacoustic tomography require numerical
inversion of the spherical mean Radon transform with the centers of integration
spheres occupying an open surface. Solution of this problem is needed (both in
2-D and 3-D) because frequently the region of interest cannot be completely
surrounded by the detectors, as it happens, for example, in breast imaging. We
present an efficient numerical algorithm for solving this problem in 2-D
(similar methods are applicable in the 3-D case). Our method is based on the
numerical approximation of plane waves by certain single layer potentials
related to the acquisition geometry. After the densities of these potentials
have been precomputed, each subsequent image reconstruction has the complexity
of the regular filtration backprojection algorithm for the classical Radon
transform. The peformance of the method is demonstrated in several numerical
examples: one can see that the algorithm produces very accurate reconstructions
if the data are accurate and sufficiently well sampled, on the other hand, it
is sufficiently stable with respect to noise in the data.
