Ultrasound transmission tomography image reconstruction with a fully convolutional neural network

Ultrasound transmission tomography image reconstruction with a fully convolutional neural network

Zhao, Wenzhao (University of Heidelberg)
Wang, Hongjian (Donghua University)
Gemmeke, Hartmut (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie)
van Dongen, K.W.A. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
Hopp, Torsten (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie)
Hesser, Jürgen (University of Heidelberg)

2020

Image reconstruction of ultrasound computed tomography based on the wave equation is able to show much more structural details than simpler ray-based image reconstruction methods. However, to invert the wave-based forward model is computationally demanding. To address this problem, we develop an efficient fully learned image reconstruction method based on a convolutional neural network. The image is reconstructed via one forward propagation of the network given input sensor data, which is much faster than the reconstruction using conventional iterative optimization methods. To transform the ultrasound measured data in the sensor domain into the reconstructed image in the image domain, we apply multiple down-scaling and up-scaling convolutional units to efficiently increase the number of hidden layers with a large receptive and projective field that can cover all elements in inputs and outputs, respectively. For dataset generation, a paraxial approximation forward model is used to simulate ultrasound measurement data. The neural network is trained with a dataset derived from natural images in ImageNet and tested with a dataset derived from medical images in OA-Breast Phantom dataset. Test results show the superior efficiency of the proposed neural network to other reconstruction algorithms including popular neural networks. When compared with conventional iterative optimization algorithms, our neural network can reconstruct a 110 × 86 image more than 20 times faster on a CPU and 1000 times faster on a GPU with comparable image quality and is also more robust to noise.

Breast cancer
Fully convolutional neural network
Image reconstruction
Paraxial approximation
Ultrasound transmission tomography

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2a206415-c67b-4605-a40f-6775321abaf9

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/abb5c3

2021-11-25

0031-9155

Physics in Medicine and Biology, 65 (23)

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 Wenzhao Zhao, Hongjian Wang, Hartmut Gemmeke, K.W.A. van Dongen, Torsten Hopp, Jürgen Hesser