A new time-of-flight (TOF) picker for tumor tissue in microwave induced thermo-acoustic tomography (MITAT) system

In this paper, a new method for accurately picking the time-of-flights (TOFs) of tumor is proposed in microwave induced thermo-acoustic tomography (MITAT) system. The proposed method makes use of the properties of induced thermal acoustic signal and combines them with the wavelet transform and Akaike information criterion (AIC). Both numerical simulations and ex vivo experimental results are given to test the performance of the proposed method. Through the simulations and experiment, the proposed method can efficiently and accurately pick the TOFs of tumor target in MITAT system and therefore provide a guarantee for imaging tumor with high accuracy.