3D regularized speed-map reconstruction in ultrasound transmission tomography

The paper is focused on ultrasonic transmission tomography as a potential medical imaging modality for breast cancer diagnosis. Ultrasound speed is one of the tissue parameters which are related to the pathological tissue state. An alternative to the commonly used filtered backprojection is presented, which can solve the problem of sparse transducer distribution. It is based on regularization of the image reconstruction problem which imposes smoothness in the resulting images while preserving edges. The approach is analyzed on synthetic data sets and illustrated on data acquired on a tissue phantom.