Quantitative Magneto-Acousto-Electric Computed Tomography (qMAE-CT): Imaging of Tissue Conductivity Distributions...

Magneto-acousto-electrical tomography (MAET) is a hybrid imaging technique that combines the ultrasound transmission with electrical detection to capture the conductivity information of soft tissue. However, most previous studies have focused mainly on reconstructing conductivity boundary information. To address this limitation, we propose a novel method termed Quantitative Magneto-Acousto-Electric Computed Tomography (qMAE-CT), which aims to achieve quantitative mapping of the full conductivity distribution. The proposed method delineates the forward process into three sequential steps, each addressed by a dedicated reconstruction strategy: model-based deconvolution, back-projection, and conductivity reconstruction using a Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN). The proposed method has been rigorously validated through numerical simulations, phantom experiments, and in vitro tissue studies. The results show that qMAE-CT can accurately reconstruct the conductivity distribution of irregular shaped targets, with a SSIM of 0.815, and the spatial resolution higher than 4 mm.