Ultrasound Computed Tomography of Knee Joint

Abstract

Ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) is considered to have great potential for the early diagnosis of knee joint injuries. Combining prior knowledge and sound speeds of tissues, UCT can diagnose a variety of symptoms and the extent of tissue lesion. However, no existing studies can reconstruct the sound speed distributions of knee joints in UCT. Therefore, in this study, sound speed distributions of knee joints are reconstructed to provide an imaging basis for the formulation of a treatment plan. In addition, Full waveform inversion (FWI) methods are utilized to estimate highresolution images. However, for media with large variations in sound speeds, traditional FWI methods may lead to a cycle-skipping phenomenon and incorrect convergence direction. Hence, this study proposes a multi-centerfrequency source based FWI method to overcome the above limitations. A penalized least-squares optimization problem is constructed to obtain a numerical solution of the sound speed distribution. Computer simulations are conducted to prove the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. Furthermore, the reasons for selecting the center frequencies of sources are analyzed. Two numerical knee joint phantoms are used to evaluate the performance. The results suggest that the biases of the reconstructed images are less than 1% under a 5% noise condition.