Sitting or Standing Data Acquisition Based Breast Ultrasound Computed Tomography

Ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) is a promising approach for early breast cancer screening. However, current studies which use prone posture to collect breast ultrasonic data cause four problems, a long non-data-acquisition time, inconvenient, possible chances for cross infection, and a large area occupied by equipment. The purpose of this study is to estimate a complete breast UCT image by using sitting or standing data acquisition, which can obtains a more rapid, convenient and sanitary examination process, and a less space occupied by equipment. Therefore, this study proposes a sitting or standing data acquisition based breast UCT method, which is a more practical data acquisition method for breast UCT. This study places a uniform soft sleeve on the outside of the breast so that it would not be deformed significantly due to the change of body posture. Because the soft sleeve is an influencing factor from outside for breast imaging, this study discusses the considerations for selecting that. Computer simulations are conducted to prove the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results suggest that, by using a soft sleeve whose sound speed is between 1450m/s and 1550m/s, the proposed method is effective; the biases of the reconstructed images are less than 1% under the 5% noise condition.