Influence of dual-frequency combination on the quality improvement of ultrasound tomography

Abstract

The most useful feature of ultrasound tomography founded on the inverse scattering theory is that it can detect small structures below the wavelength of the pressure wave. A popular method introduced in ultrasound tomography is the Distorted Born Iterative Method (DBIM). Recently, the dual-frequency combination technique has been utilized to improve the reconstruction quality and increase the convergence rate of the DBIM. This method uses two frequencies, f 1 (low) and f 2 (high), to estimate the sound contrast in N f 1 and N f 2 iterations, respectively. However, the influence of these iteration parameters on the overall performance of the system is not yet known. In this paper, it is shown by using the simulation technique that if we do not pay attention to the choice of these parameters, the reconstruction quality might be worse than that using a single frequency. Furthermore, we focus on the best way to select the parameters in order to improve the reconstruction quality of ultrasound tomography. Given a fixed sum N iter of N f 1 and N f 2 , simulation results show that the best value of N f 1 is N iter /2; this choice of parameters offers a normalized error that reduces by 67.6%, compared to the conventional DBIM using a single frequency.

An Enhanced Multi-Frequency Distorted Born Iterative Method for Ultrasound Tomography Based on Fundamental Tone and Overtones

“…Fig. 5 also confirmed that using multi-frequency DBIM image reconstruction offers better performance than conventional DBIM and our previous study (Tran et al, 2016). The technique of using multi-frequency is realistic because the ultrasound probes now a large frequency bandwidth.…”

“…The reason behind this is the relatively small difference between the true contrast and initial contrast (Born approximation satisfied). In (Jonathan & Oelze, 2013), (Tijhuis et al, 2001), (Lavarello & Oelze, 2010), (Tran et al, 2016), the authors suggested using more than two frequencies to get the resolution of a tomographic ultrasound image closer to the level of tissue image reconstruction. Not only for ultrasound tomography, the multiple -frequency technique is also applied for ultrasound images in (Ma et al, 2015;Sayed, 2018;Varray et al, 2012;Yoshizumi et al, 2009).…”

High Sound-Contrast Inverse Scattering by MR-MF-DBIM Scheme

“…The quality of the recovered images by this scheme is better than that of the DBIM, and the computation time is also significantly reduced. The multi-frequency (MF) technique has been studied and applied to the DBIM in [25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. This approach is applied as follows: in the first step, the lower frequency acquired data are used to ensure fast convergence, and in the second step, the higher frequency acquired data are used to ensure the high resolution of the reconstructed image.…”