Breast imaging using waveform attenuation tomography

Ex vivo studies using our ultrasound waveform attenuation algorithm have shown promising results for detection and characterization of lesions of different types. Our preliminary in vivo study shows that the waveform attenuation image has much higher resolution and can better delineate breast lesions boundaries than the corresponding ray-based attenuation image. In this study, we preprocessed our time domain waveforms acquired with a ring array and explored the directional transducer beam pattern to better match calculated wave fields with respect to the acquired wave fields. We have applied waveform attenuation to in vivo data and compared the resulting waveform attenuation images with the ray-based counterparts to assess the resolution and accuracy of the waveform attenuation reconstruction.