Animal study of high-speed iterative refraction calibration method for ultrasound computed tomography

We are developing an ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) system for early breast-cancer screening. USCT has great advantages over mammographies because of its lack of X-ray exposure and compression pain. USCT can show both the reflection boundary (structure) distribution and the sound speed (hardness) distribution in a subject, which is estimated from the time-of-flight (TOF) information of transmitted ultrasound waves on the basis of an X-ray CT algorithm. Considering the nature of ultrasound waves, improving the image quality generally increases the calculation burden. To achieve both high-quality images and high throughput, we developed an iterative refraction calibration method. The measured TOF sinogram was iteratively calibrated by the difference between the fastest wave arrival time and the arrival time of the wave along the geometrically shortest path in a section. This method was applied to the data of a gel phantom and a dog's tumor extirpated at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, which was measured by a USCT prototype with a 10 cm-diameter ring array. As a result, we achieved a calculation speed seven times faster than that of a conventional bent-ray reconstruction with the same contrast as that of a sound-speed image.