Model-data-driven image reconstruction with neural networks for ultrasound computed tomography breast imaging

With the goal of developing an accurate and fast image reconstruction algorithm for ultrasound computed tomography, we combine elements of model- and data-driven approaches and propose a learned method which addresses the disadvantages of both approaches. We design a deep neural network which accounts for a nonlinear forward operator and primal-dual algorithm by its inherent network architecture. The network is trained end-to-end, with ultrasound pressure field data as input to get directly an optimized reconstruction of speed of sound and attenuation images. The training and test data are based on a set of Optical and Acoustic Breast Phantom Database, where we use the image as ground truth and simulate pressure field data according to our forward model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves significant improvements over state-of-the-art reconstruction methods in this field. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm improves the measures structural similarity measure (SSIM) from 0.74 to 0.95 and root mean squared error (RMSE) from 0.13 to 0.09 on average concerning the speed of sound reconstruction, while it improves the SSIM from 0.60 to 0.94 and RMSE from 0.24 to 0.10 on average in attenuation reconstruction.