Abstract

Info

Title:: Accurate calculation method of time of flight for breast ultrasound transmission tomography

Author(s):: GAO Peng1; 2; LIU Yangchuan2; YANG Zhi3; GAO Xin2; 1. School of Electronic and Optical Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing 210094, China 2. Medical Imaging Department, Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Suzhou 215163, China 3. School of Biomedical Engineering, Capital Medical University, Beijing 100069, China

Keywords:: ultrasound transmission computed tomography time-of-flight sound-speed image extreme-point method k-wave filtered back-projection

Abstract:: Objective Aiming at ultrasound transmission tomography (UTCT) of breast , a method for accurately calculating ultrasonic time-of-flight (TOF) was proposed to achieve high-quality reconstruction of quantitative breast sound -speed image. Methods The UTCT scanning environment was set up by k-wave platform to obtain the scanning data of two kinds of digital breast phantoms with different complexity. The extreme-point method and the commonly used threshold method, zero-crossing method and peak method were respectively used to calculate TOF, and the sound-speed image was reconstructed by filtering back-projection algorithm . Results The TOF calculated by the peak method cannot reconstruct the complete sound-speed image . The sound-speed image reconstructed by the extreme point method proposed in this paper is superior to the other two methods in root mean square error (RMSE) and structural similarity index (SSIM), compared with the threshold method and the zero-crossing method, the RMSE of the extreme point method is reduced by 8.025% and 1.643% on average, the SSIM is increased by 1.708% and 1.68% on average. Conclusion The extreme-point method can accurately calculate TOF, which is helpful for obtaining high-quality sound-speed images in UTCT scanning