State of the Art and Future of Acoustical Holography in Medicine and Biology

Abstract

The first acoustic holograms were recorded just 15 years ago, and a few months later even ultrasonic holograms from a living human eye having a tumor were reconstructed [1,2]. In the past one and a half decade several attempts have been made all around the world to use ultrasonic holographic imaging in medical diagnosis, nevertheless, existing ultrasonic imaging methods yield under clinical conditions a far better image quality at less cost. The scope of this review is to investigate whether ultrasonic holography can ever produce anything approaching a realistic 3-D reconstruction of insonified objects in the frequency range used in medical diagnostics, and how acoustical holography can help differential diagnostics when not the knowledge about shape but the knowledge about structure is important.