Circular antenna for breast ultrasonic diffraction tomography.

Compared to echography, which exploits only the reflected field, ultrasonic diffraction tomography improves image resolution by combining the total diffracted field. For breast cancer imaging, this improvement reinforces contrast between various breast tissues and structures by eliminating some interference phenomena such as speckle and then allowing parameterization of the images. Our work concerns the development of an experimental set-up for fast acquisition of the diffracted field and construction of two-dimensional tomographic images. For this purpose, we developed a multichannel ultrasound circular antenna with eight focused transducers.