Fast Image Reconstruction in Ultrasound Transmission Tomography by U-net

Conventional iterative methods for image reconstruction in ultrasound transmission tomography need to perform many iterations where at each iteration one has to compute the complex forward model of ultrasound wave propagation, and hence they are time-consuming. We use a U-net neural network to accelerate the reconstruction, by training the network to map from an initial reconstruction obtained via a few iterations of L-BFGS method to the target ground truth image. Since the computation of a forward pass of the neural network is very fast, we can expect a significant acceleration using the trained network for image reconstruction. Experiments show that our trained network can replace 40 L-BFGS iterations to generate equivalent reconstructions with slightly better quantitative quality in terms of normalized root mean square error and better visual quality due to the network's denoising effect. It can achieve up to 283× speedup compared with L-BFGS method for reconstructing small-size sound speed images with 80×80 pixels. This implies that we can expect even greater acceleration effects when applying such approach to reconstruct large-size 3D images.