3D Frequency-Domain Full Waveform Inversion for Whole-Breast Imaging With a Multi-Row Ring Array

For ring-array ultrasound tomography, two-dimensional frequency-domain full waveform inversion is the clinical gold standard for high-resolution imaging of the breast. While yielding high-resolution images in the plane of the ring-array, the resulting slice-wise approach yields lower resolution out of plane when used to reconstruct the full volume. Instead, this work proposes a fully three-dimensional full-waveform inversion based on a multi-row ring-array transducer to improve out-of-plane resolution, while using cylindrical-wave transmissions to minimize acquisition and reconstruction time. For each numerical breast phantom tested, the root-mean-square error of three-dimensional full-waveform inversion is less than that of two-dimensional slice-wise full-waveform inversion by 6.3-13.7 m/s.