A Modified Ray Tracing Method for Ultrasound Computed Tomography in Breast Imaging

Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT) is one of the edging medical imaging technique to detect breast cancer at early stage. This paper proposed a modified ray tracing method (MRTM) which can be exploited by USCT. Different from traditional bent-ray tracing method (BRTM), the MRTM holds a hypothesis that ultrasound waves spread along straight lines and refract only on tissue boundaries. In this paper, the boundary information is extracted from B-mode imaging. We compare the reconstruction images using the MRTM and BRTM. The results show that the imaging quality of the former is similar with and even better than the latter, while the reconstruction time is reduced by an order of magnitude with the MRTM.