Aberration correction for time-domain ultrasound diffraction tomography.

Extensions of a time-domain diffraction tomography method, which reconstructs spatially dependent sound speed variations from far-field time-domain acoustic scattering measurements, are presented and analyzed. The resulting reconstructions are quantitative images with applications including ultrasonic mammography, and can also be considered candidate solutions to the time-domain inverse scattering problem. Here, the linearized time-domain inverse scattering problem is shown to have no general solution for finite signal bandwidth. However, an approximate solution to the linearized problem is constructed using a simple delay-and-sum method analogous to "gold standard" ultrasonic beamforming. The form of this solution suggests that the full nonlinear inverse scattering problem can be approximated by applying appropriate angle- and space-dependent time shifts to the time-domain scattering data; this analogy leads to a general approach to aberration correction. Two related methods for aberration correction are presented: one in which delays are computed from estimates of the medium using an efficient straight-ray approximation, and one in which delays are applied directly to a time-dependent linearized reconstruction. Numerical results indicate that these correction methods achieve substantial quality improvements for imaging of large scatterers. The parametric range of applicability for the time-domain diffraction tomography method is increased by about a factor of 2 by aberration correction.