Abstract
Most publications concerning ultrasound diffraction tomography (UDT) focus on a perfect reconstruction of the object to be imaged. This approach is rendered infeasible in most situations in clinical ultrasound imaging by the required number of transmission measurements for different angles. In this contribution a theoretical framework for UDT relying exclusively on backscatter measurements is derived. The framework is established for plane wave excitation with a fixed linear transducer array. In contrast to the majority of models, the influence of an inhomogeneous distribution of mass density is pointed out. The framework is validated experimentally with pulse-echo measurement data acquired by a commercial ultrasound imaging system from a wire phantom and a human vessel phantom. The obtained lateral and axial resolutions are identical to those achieved by delay-and-sum beamforming whereas image artifacts are reduced. The achieved contrast in the vessel phantom is improved in contrast to delay-and-sum beamforming by 2 dB.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the State of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW, Germany) and the European Union for their financial support. This research is part of ForSaTum (http://www.forsatum.de) sponsored by Ziel2.NRW “Regionale Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und Beschäftigung” 2007–2013 co-financed by the European regional development fund (ERDF), grant no. 005-0908-0117. Additionally, the authors would like to thank Markus C. Hesse for helpful discussions and for pointing out useful literature.
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Schiffner, M.F., Schmitz, G. (2012). Plane Wave Pulse-Echo Ultrasound Diffraction Tomography with a Fixed Linear Transducer Array. In: Nowicki, A., Litniewski, J., Kujawska, T. (eds) Acoustical Imaging. Acoustical Imaging, vol 31. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2619-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2619-2_3
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