PROJECT TITLE :

Compressed Sensing for Ultrasound Computed Tomography

ABSTRACT:

Ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) permits the reconstruction of quantitative tissue characteristics, such as speed of sound, mass density, and attenuation. Lowering its acquisition time would be beneficial; however, this is often essentially restricted by the physical time of flight and the quantity of transmission events. During this letter, we propose a compressed sensing solution for UCT. The adopted measurement scheme relies on compressed acquisitions, with concurrent randomised transmissions in a very circular array configuration. Reconstruction of the image is then obtained by combining the born iterative methodology and total variation minimization, thereby exploiting variation sparsity in the image domain. Analysis using simulated UCT scattering measurements shows that the proposed transmission theme performs higher than uniform undersampling, and is able to reduce acquisition time by almost one order of magnitude, while maintaining high spatial resolution.