Synthetic focusing in ultrasound modulated tomography

TL;DR

This paper introduces a synthetic focusing approach in ultrasound modulated tomography that reconstructs focused responses from unfocused wave measurements, enabling practical imaging without precise wave focusing.

Contribution

It proposes a novel synthetic focusing method to bypass the technical challenge of wave focusing in ultrasound tomography.

Findings

Reconstructed images from simulated data demonstrate the method's feasibility.

Synthetic focusing can potentially improve practical ultrasound tomography applications.

Abstract

Several hybrid tomographic methods utilizing ultrasound modulation have been introduced lately. Success of these methods hinges on the feasibility of focusing ultrasound waves at an arbitrary point of interest. Such a focusing, however, is difficult to achieve in practice. We thus propose a way to avoid the use of focused waves through the so called synthetic focusing, i.e. by the reconstruction of the would-be response to the focused modulation from the measurements corresponding to realistic unfocused waves. Examples of reconstructions from simulated data are provided. This non-technical paper describes only the general concept, while technical details will appear elsewhere.