Cross-correlation Full Waveform Inversion for Sound Speed Reconstruction in Ultrasound Computed Tomography

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) is considered to have great potential for breast cancer screening. Compared with the ray based methods, the reconstructed image using full waveform inversion (FWI) methods have higher spatial resolution. However, the results of FWI is difficult to converge to the real value when cycle skipping occurs. In this paper, a cross-correlation full waveform inversion(CC-FWI) is proposed for USCT image reconstruction. In the first stage, the ajoint source is adjusted as the residual of predicted signal and time-shifted measured signal to avoid cycle skipping. In the remaining stage, the FWI with source encoding is employed to accelerate convergence. The simulations are conducted to demonstrate the validity of the proposed algorithm. The root mean squared error (RMSE) of the proposed algorithm is much smaller than that of conventional FWI. The results suggest that CC-FWI is effective in avoiding cycle skipping. Clinical Relevance- Clinical relevance- New imaging modalities of high resolution, safety to examines for early-stage breast cancer imaging are urgently needed for researching and development. Ultra-sound computed tomography (USCT) is supposed to meet the above requirements and it can be potentially deployed in breast scanning.