Ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography using energy-scaled amplitude ratios

Abstract

Ultrasound attenuation of breast tumors is related to their types and pathological states, and can be used to detect and characterize breast cancer. Particularly, ultrasound scattering attenuation can infer the margin properties of breast tumors. Ultrasound attenuation tomography quantitatively reconstructs the attenuation properties of the breast. Our synthetic-aperture breast ultrasound tomography system with two parallel transducer arrays records both ultrasound reflection and transmission signals. We develop an ultrasound attenuation tomography method using ultrasound energy-scaled amplitude decays of ultrasound transmission signals and conduct ultrasound attenuation tomography using a known sound-speed model. We apply our ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography method to a breast phantom dataset, and compare the ultrasound attenuation tomography results with conventional beamforming ultrasound images obtained using reflection signals. We show that ultrasound transmission attenuation tomography complements beamforming images in identifying breast lesions.