Fast Low-Cost Single Element Ultrasound Reflectivity Tomography Using Angular Distribution Analysis

We propose a new reconstruction method for ultrasound reflectivity tomography. Our imaging setup is based around a single imaging and sensing element travelling along the perimeter of a circular domain. A 2D reflectivity field of the interior of the domain is recovered based on back-scattered echoes recorded at a large number of element positions. To obtain high-quality images, we suggest a simple new approach to resolve the angular ambiguity inherent to ultrasound measurements based on circular wave-fronts. The analysis incorporates observations obtained at several adjacent positions of a sensing elements. The method is validated using simulated and real data of a human limb. The validation shows improvement of the image quality compared to the classical image reconstruction algorithm for such setups.