A High-Resolution USCT Echo Imaging Method with Reduced Data-Acquisition

In recent years, ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) has been developing as an alternative to mammography for the screening/diagnosis of breast cancer because it is non-ionizing and able to create 3D volume images. The state-of-the-art USCT echo imaging method that achieves the highest possible spatial resolution is synthetic aperture (SA). However, in order to reconstruct a high-resolution image, SA requires a large number of transmissions (TX), which leads to time-consuming data-acquisition process and heavy data-storage demands, thus rendering USCT inefficient for large-scale fast screening. Here, we propose a new imaging method that enables using 1/10 less TX to reconstruct images with even better spatial resolution than SA. Instead of using back-projection which is the basis of SA, we formulate the USCT imaging problem into a large linear equation system and reconstruct the image by solving the inversion problem. This new method is valuable in promoting the application of USCT in the large-scale fast screening of breast cancer, since reducing of TX leads to faster data-acquisition and less data-storage demands.