Ultrasound attenuation tomography for breast cancer detection Seminar
- Time:
- 16:00
- Date:
- 5 November 2019
- Venue:
- Building 13 / Room 3017
Event details
Ultrasound computed tomography (UCT) is a medical imaging modality that aims to generate quantitative maps of the acoustic properties of tissue for the detection of cancer. Together, measurement of the sound speed and acoustic attenuation coefficient of breast tissue can be used to distinguish malignant lesions from healthy tissue.
State-of-the-art UCT systems are able to reconstruct high resolution images of the sound speed of tissue from measurements of the time-of-flight of ultrasound through the breast. However, reconstruction of the attenuation distribution has proven more difficult due the need to determine the amplitude of the received wave, which is highly aberrated due to the heterogeneity of sound-speeds within the breast. Traditional piezoelectric sensors are prone to underestimation of the received amplitude due to spatial averaging across the aberrated wave fronts, as well as their directional response.
We have developed a prototype UCT system that employs a novel, omnidirectional, phase-insensitive ultrasound sensor based on the pyroelectric effect that is immune to spatial averaging and directivity effects, and can therefore generate quantitative maps of attenuation. We have tested the system using commercial breast phantoms, and compared the resulting images with ground-truth attenuation maps generated from X-ray CT images and the known attenuation coefficients of the materials.
Speaker information
Christian Baker , National Physics Laboratory . Christian Baker received the B.Sc. degree in acoustics with music from the ISVR in 2008 and the M.Sc. in acoustics and music technology from the University of Edinburgh in 2009. He has been working as a research scientist in ultrasound metrology at the National Physical Laboratory since 2009, focusing on ultrasound field measurement, phase-insensitive ultrasound and quantitative imaging. He is currently finalising his thesis for a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering with King’s College London.