Wideband quantitative ultrasonic imaging by time-domain diffraction tomography

A quantitative ultrasonic imaging method employing time-domain scattering data is presented. This method provides tomographic images of medium properties such as the sound speed contrast; these images are equivalent to multiple-frequency filtered-backpropagation reconstructions using all frequencies within the bandwidth of the incident pulse employed. However, image synthesis is performed directly in the time domain using coherent combination of far-field scattered pressure waveforms, delayed and summed to numerically focus on the unknown medium. The time-domain method is more efficient than multiple-frequency diffraction tomography methods, and can, in some cases, be more efficient than single-frequency diffraction tomography. Example reconstructions, obtained using synthetic data for two- and three-dimensional scattering of wideband pulses, show that the time-domain reconstruction method provides image quality superior to single-frequency reconstructions for objects of size and contrast relevant to medi...

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