Ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography using energy-scaled amplitude ratios

Ultrasound attenuation of breast tumors is related to their types and pathological states, and can be used to detect and characterize breast cancer. Particularly, ultrasound scattering attenuation can infer the margin properties of breast tumors. Ultrasound attenuation tomography quantitatively reconstructs the attenuation properties of the breast. Our synthetic-aperture breast ultrasound tomography system with two parallel transducer arrays records both ultrasound reflection and transmission signals. We develop an ultrasound attenuation tomography method using ultrasound energy-scaled amplitude decays of ultrasound transmission signals and conduct ultrasound attenuation tomography using a known sound-speed model. We apply our ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography method to a breast phantom dataset, and compare the ultrasound attenuation tomography results with conventional beamforming ultrasound images obtained using reflection signals. We show that ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography complements beamforming images in identifying breast lesions.

[1]  Martin O Culjat,et al.  A review of tissue substitutes for ultrasound imaging. , 2010, Ultrasound in medicine & biology.

[2]  K. Parker,et al.  Comparison of techniques for in vivo attenuation measurements , 1988, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[3]  Michael A. Saunders,et al.  LSQR: An Algorithm for Sparse Linear Equations and Sparse Least Squares , 1982, TOMS.

[4]  Zhigang Zhang,et al.  Ultrasound waveform tomography with the total-variation regularization for detection of small breast tumors , 2012, Medical Imaging.

[5]  Neb Duric,et al.  Comparison of ultrasound attenuation tomography methods for breast imaging , 2008, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[6]  Neb Duric,et al.  Sound-speed and attenuation imaging of breast tissue using waveform tomography of transmission ultrasound data , 2007, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[7]  Lianjie Huang,et al.  Ultrasound waveform tomography using wave-energy-based preconditioning , 2013, Medical Imaging.

[8]  Junseob Shin,et al.  Breast ultrasound tomography with two parallel transducer arrays: preliminary clinical results , 2015, Medical Imaging.

[9]  Paul L Carson,et al.  First-arrival traveltime sound speed inversion with a priori information. , 2014, Medical physics.

[10]  Radovan Jirik,et al.  Ultrasonic attenuation tomography based on log-spectrum analysis , 2005, SPIE Medical Imaging.

[11]  J. Vidale.  Finite-difference calculation of travel times , 1988 .

[12]  Junseob Shin,et al.  Ultrasound bent-ray tomography with a modified total-variation regularization scheme , 2013, Medical Imaging.

[13]  Avinash C. Kak,et al.  Signal Processing of Broadband Pulsed Ultrasound: Measurement of Attenuation of Soft Biological Tissues , 1978, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[14]  F. Dunn,et al.  Compilation of empirical ultrasonic properties of mammalian tissues. II. , 1980, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[15]  Zhigang Zhang,et al.  Efficient implementation of ultrasound waveform tomography using source encoding , 2012, Medical Imaging.

[16]  Michael A. Saunders,et al.  Algorithm 583: LSQR: Sparse Linear Equations and Least Squares Problems , 1982, TOMS.

[17]  Kouichi Itoh,et al.  A New Method for Attenuation Coefficient Measurement in the Liver , 2002, Journal of ultrasound in medicine : official journal of the American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine.

[18]  E. Walach,et al.  Local tissue attenuation images based on pulsed-echo ultrasound scans , 1989, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering.

[19]  Lianjie Huang,et al.  Ultrasound bent-ray tomography using both transmission and reflection data , 2014, Medical Imaging.

[20]  J. Vidale.  Finite‐difference calculation of traveltimes in three dimensions , 1990 .

[21]  F. Dunn,et al.  Comprehensive compilation of empirical ultrasonic properties of mammalian tissues. , 1978, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.