Detection of velocity and attenuation inclusions in the medical ultrasound tomography

Abstract

Abstract The paper is devoted to numerical research of the medical ultrasound tomography problem. This problem consists in finding small inclusions in the breast tissue by boundary measurements of the acoustic waves generated by sources located on the boundary. For medical diagnostic, it is important to recover the image of the acoustical medium and to determine the values of velocity, attenuation and density. In the paper, we describe a numerical experiment of visualization of several inclusions using the energy version of the reverse time migration (RTM). Certainly, the RTM image does not separate velocity and attenuation inclusions. However, kinematic and amplitude analysis gives a possibility to estimate values of the velocity and attenuation. As a result, we split the RTM image into two ones. Note that in this paper we consider the scalar value of sound velocity.