Diffraction tomography applied to simulated ultrasound through breast tissue

Diffraction tomography is used to obtain images of sound speed and attenuation of a slice of breast tissue obtained from the Visible Woman data set. Simulated ultrasound data was generated using an acoustic propagation code run on the ASCI Blue Pacific computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Data was generated for a slice of healthy tissue, and a slice with simulated lesions to determine the ability of the imaging method to detect various abnormalities in the breast. In addition, the time reversal operator for the slice was constructed from the data and the eigenfunctions backpropagated into the slice as first suggested by Mast [Mast, Nachman, and Waag, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102(2)] to identify structures associated with each time reversal mode for both the healthy tissue and tissue with lesions.