Compressive sensing based contrast-enhanced thermoacoustic imaging for breast cancer detection

Thermoacoustic imaging (TAI) has been shown to be promising for breast cancer detection. Contrast-enhanced TAI (CETAI) applying exogenous contrast agents can enhance the contrast in the dielectric properties between the tumor and its surrounding tissues. Combining compressive sensing (CS) and CET AI can make the measurements much more time-efficient. This work proposes a new approach to enable the advancing of the CS based CETAI from 2-D to 3-D. Simulation result using a realistic breast phantom shows that the measurement of CS based CET AI can be expedited by a factor more than 10 compared with the conventional CET AI.