Reconstruction of sound speed distributions from pulse-echo data

Ultrasonic imaging is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of biomedical imaging currently employed in the clinical setting due its safety, affordability, and real-time imaging capabilities. However, the poor image quality of standard brightness mode (B-Mode) images has inspired research into alternative acoustic imaging modalities, such as sound speed imaging. Historically, sound speed tomography has been employed in transmission-mode because of the limited k-space coverage available in backscattered data. However, such imaging techniques require specialized hardware configurations, and are often only limited to tissue such as the breast where full angular coverage is available. A recent approach [Jaeger et al., UMB, 41: 235-250, 2015] has demonstrated the feasibility of sound speed imaging using only pulse-echo data, which only requires a single array probe, commonly available in a clinical setting. This approach allows for complementary k-space coverage by utilizing relative temporal shifts between success...