volume | PIER Journals

Abstract

Time-of-flight (TOF) has been used to estimate sound velocity (SV) distribution of heterogeneous tissue to relieve the effect of acoustic heterogeneity in microwave-induced thermo-acoustic tomography (MITAT). Accurately picking the TOFs is significantly important to ensure high accuracy SV images, which greatly help to reconstruct the microwave absorption distribution accurately. However, current methods for picking the TOFs are designed for single source case. For breast tumor detection in MITAT, these methods become ineffective or even fail at the situation where multiple tumors are embedded in a normal breast tissue. In order to accurately reconstruct the microwave absorption properties of tumors in heterogeneous tissue in MITAT, an efficient method for picking tumors' TOFs is proposed. Combining the advantages of the wavelet transform and Akaike information criterion (AIC), the proposed method introduces a concept of separate extraction of TOFs. It can efficiently and accurately pick the TOFs of different tumors from the measured data in MITAT. Using the TOFs picked by the proposed method can efficiently help to reduce the effect of acoustic heterogeneity and greatly improve the accuracy and the image contrast of reconstructed microwave absorption properties. Some numerical simulations are given to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method in this paper.

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Dr. Jinguo Wang

Professor Zhiqin Zhao

Dr. Jian Song

Professor Zai-Ping Nie

Prof. Qing Huo Liu