Transrectal ultrasound-waveform tomography using plane-wave ultrasound reflection data for prostate cancer imaging

Ultrasound tomography is to reconstruct tissue mechanical properties using ultrasound signals for cancer characterization. We study the capability of plane-wave ultrasound-waveform inversion to reconstruct sound-speed values of prostate tumors. Our ultrasound-waveform inversion algorithm iteratively fits synthetic ultrasound waveforms with recorded ultrasound waveforms starting from an initial model. We verify the algorithm using synthetic ultrasound data for numerical prostate phantoms consisting of multiple tumors in homogeneous and heterogeneous background prostate tissues. Our reconstruction results demonstrate that our new plane-wave transrectal ultrasound-waveform tomography has the potential to accurately reconstruct the sound-speed values of prostate tumors for cancer characterization. In addition, we build a new transrectal ultrasound tomography prototype using a 256-channel Verasonics Vantage system and a GE intracavitary curved linear array to acquire plane-wave ultrasound reflection data for transrectal ultrasound tomography.