Investigation of Transducer Distribution in Compressive Thermoacoustic Tomography for Breast Cancer Detection

Microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography (MITAT) is a novel noninvasive method for biomedical applications such as imaging and cancer detection. Recently, compressive sensing (CS) has been applied in MITAT, denoted as compressive thermoacoustic tomography (CTAT), which can greatly reduce the number of measurements while maintaining the image quality. This work reports the study on the effect of distribution of transducer array on image quality in CTAT for the application of breast tumor detection. Different distributions are tested by both simulation and experimental works to compare the quality of imaging. Three breast samples made of pork fat containing tumor-mimicking phantoms are used as the object to evaluate the effect of distribution of transducer array on image quality through the experiment. The results show that the transducer array, which is distributed evenly on a hemisphere surface, is able to achieve an excellent image reconstruction result that is better than other tested types of transducer array distribution. This work gives a faithful guidance on the distribution strategy of transducer array for CTAT in breast tumor detection and other potential applications.