Glasses for 3D ultrasound computer tomography

A promising candidate for breast cancer imaging is ultrasound computer tomography (USCT). At KIT a 3D USCT with a semi-ellipsoidal aperture consisting of several hundreds of US transducers was built. Spherical waves are sequentially emitted and received. 3D SAFT is applied to reconstruct reflectivity volumes. However, straight forward SAFT imaging leads to blurred images. A post-imaging de-blurring approach applying aperture characteristics is described here and analyzed with a simulation and a clinical data set. A increase of 26% in the mean resolution in imaging simulation with a point scatters was achieved. A increase in resolution with breast images was observed, too.