Numerical Analysis of Ultrasound Tomography and Frequency Optimization in Human Abdomen Model

Abstract

Ultrasound Tomography (UT) is a non-invasive, safe, dynamic and relatively inexpensive imaging technique for abdominal diagnosing and monitoring. With the mature of pulse-echo technique, the B-mode ultrasound scanning is widely used in medical examinations. However, such methods have the disadvantages of low resolution with limited information contained in received signal. Here, to deal with this issue, a continuous-wave UT method is presented to image the lesion in upper human abdomen. A series of numerical calculation are conducted to discuss the effect of the incident pressure and frequency on the abdomen ultrasonic field, and the incident frequency is optimized according to the resolution and received signal amplitude synthetically as indicators. Both the distinguishability calculation and lesion reconstruction are conducted under optimized frequency, of which the result indicates a preferable improvement of distinguishability in major organs and a promising locating accuracy of primary tumor in reconstructed images, proving the feasibility of using continuous-wave UT method in full-field human abdomen examination to detect the lesion in major organs.