Accelerating image reconstruction speed in ultrasound computed tomography with structural information

In ray tracing based ultrasound computed tomography (USCT), utilizing structural information improves the sound speed image reconstruction. In this work, we further show that restricting image reconstruction area in the object using a prior object’s boundary information further improves the convergence speed of the optimization for the inverse problem without sacrificing image quality. The proposed method uses the previously reported signal domain method to detect the object’s outer boundary. Given this a prior information, only the rays passing the object were used and the reconstruction was restricted inside the object. Compared with the region non-restricted approach, the region restricted approach demonstrated faster convergence rate and lower computation cost in both simulation and phantom experiments, while the image quality is not compromised.