Description
Background：
Ultrasound Computed Tomography (USCT) is a promising medical imaging tool, which reconstructs the images of the object using both reflected and transmitted ultrasound signals. Attenuation tomography of USCT has been studied by many researchers since its great clinical potential of early breast cancer detection.
Material and Method：
The Lucid USCT system developed in Medical Ultrasound Lab was used to capture the breast phantom signals. The system contains one 2048-element ring array with the center frequency 3.0 MHz. The diameter of the ring is 220 mm, and the sampling frequency is 25 MHz. Filtered back projection (FBP) is widely adopted as a classical analytic reconstruction method for image reconstruction. In this study, a fan-beam FBP algorithm is used for attenuation tomography of the breast phantom which has 3 cylinders with different attenuation coefficients to mimic the cyst, benign, and malignant tumors.
Results：
The size of the reconstructed image is 1024x1024, and the 3 cylinders can be clearly shown and distinguished from the background. There exits circle artifacts around the cylinders.
Conclusion：
The result shows that the fan-beam FBP algorithm can reconstruct the image of the breast phantom and distinguish the imaging objects with different attenuation coefficients. The artifacts in the reconstructed image are to be resolved in the future work.
