Sound speed imaging of cortical bone and soft tissue based on frequency-domain ultrasound waveform tomography

Abstract

Abstract As one of the ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) algorithms, full-waveform inversion (FWI) can recover clear and detailed internal structures of bones by iteratively minimizing the misfit between observed and numerical data. However, time domain full-waveform inversion (TDFWI) often lacks sufficient low-frequency information, and the computation of full-time data imposes a significant computational burden. Besides, there are few studies on whole-medium reconstruction that jointly invert the bone and surrounding soft tissues. In this study, an FWI-based frequency-domain UCT (FD-UCT) is utilized for simultaneously imaging the sound speed of bones and soft tissues, which facilitates the inversion efficiency while ensuring the existence of low-frequency information. Simulated studies show that the FD-UCT can both reconstruct bones with large acoustic impedance and distinguish subtle impedance differences within soft tissues to reveal lesions.