Real-time ultrasound process tomography for two-phase flow imaging using a reduced number of transducers

In this paper a novel ultrasound tomography imaging system is presented. It employs a relatively small number of transducers that produce fan-shaped beam profile to effectively insonify the cross-section. The impact on the image quality due to the reduction of the number of transducers is discussed, and different approaches such as multiple receiver data acquisition and nonlinear thresholding are explored. A prototype of a tomographic imaging system with only 36 transducers has been constructed, and processing rates of up to 100 frames per second have been achieved using a parallel processing technique. Good image reconstructions based on simulations and real objects also are provided to confirm the principles of the theoretical analysis.