A regularized inverse approach to ultrasonic pulse-echo imaging

Author

Lavarello, Roberto ; Kamalabadi, Farzad ; Brien, William D O, Jr.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Illinois Univ., Urbana, IL

Volume

25

Issue

6

fYear

2006

fDate

6/1/2006 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

712

Lastpage

722

Abstract

An inverse-theoretic approach to ultrasonic pulse-echo imaging based on nonquadratic regularization is presented, and its effectiveness is investigated computationally by: 1) evaluating the quality of the reconstruction of speckle-based images as a function of the transmit-receive bandwidth and focal number of the transducer; 2) comparing the reconstructed images with those obtained by using conventional B-mode imaging. The L-curve and the generalized cross-validation methods were evaluated as automatic regularization parameter selection techniques. The inversion using regularization produced better results than conventional B-mode imaging for high signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). A lower bound of 30 dB for the SNR was found for this study, below which several of the image features were lost during the reconstruction process in order to control the distortion due to the noise

Keywords

biomedical ultrasonics; image reconstruction; medical image processing; noise; 30 dB; L-curve; automatic regularization parameter selection technique; conventional B-mode imaging; generalized cross-validation methods; inverse theory; noise effects; nonquadratic regularization; regularized inverse approach; speckle-based image reconstruction; transducer; transmit-receive bandwidth; ultrasonic pulse-echo imaging; Acoustic imaging; Acoustic pulses; Acoustic scattering; Acoustic transducers; Image reconstruction; Image resolution; Spatial resolution; Speckle; Ultrasonic imaging; Ultrasonic transducers; Inverse problems; pulse-echo imaging; regularization; ultrasound imaging;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0278-0062

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TMI.2006.873297

Filename

1637529