Image reconstruction for robot assisted ultrasound tomography

Abstract

An investigation of several image reconstruction methods for robot-assisted ultrasound (US) tomography setup is presented. In the robot-assisted setup, an expert moves the US probe to the location of interest, and a robotic arm automatically aligns another US probe with it. The two aligned probes can then transmit and receive US signals which are subsequently used for tomographic reconstruction. This study focuses on reconstruction of the speed of sound. In various simulation evaluations as well as in an experiment with a millimeter-range inaccuracy, we demonstrate that the limited data provided by two probes can be used to reconstruct pixel-wise images differentiating between media with different speeds of sound. Combining the results of this investigation with the developed robot-assisted US tomography setup, we envision feasibility of this setup for tomographic imaging in applications beyond breast imaging, with potentially significant efficacy in cancer diagnosis.