Reflectivity Reconstruction Based on Adaptive Speed of Sound Estimation from Reflection Information

The reflectivity image reconstructed by the synthetic focus algorithm has been verified to be one of the highest in resolution of any ultrasound imaging systems. However present imaging systems with the synthetic focus algorithm suffer from signal registration problems due to diffraction and refraction effects. Recent research efforts on refraction correction for reflection imaging are based on speed of sound estimation. One approach is to determine the speed of the sound map from transmission information. In this technique, both reflection and transmission data are required. Unfortunately, it is difficult to acquire both transmission and reflection in many practical medical environments. In this dissertation, a new reflectivity reconstruction technique is investigated in which the speed of sound estimation is determined only from the reflection data. This method of speed of sound estimation is based on an optimization approach. The speed of sound of the imaging region is updated iterately based one optimization. The criterion employed is the minimization of an objective functional. In particular, the alignment error functional, correlation functional or brightness functional are defined and then investigated. These objective functionals are all dependent on the speed of sound. During the process of minimizing the objective functional with respect to the speed of sound, an approximation to the true speed of sound is determined adaptively. To minimize these specific objective functionals, the conjugate gradient method with line search and with quadratic approximation is investigated. For such a large optimization problem, an undesired local minimum is often found. The penalty function technique is suggested to overcome this local minimum problem. Due to the limitation of available computer capability, all the methods developed are first investigated by a 8 x 8 grid reconstruction of speed of sound. Finally, the simulation results for a lager 64 x 64 reflectivity reconstruction with corresponding 16 x 16 speed of sound estimation verify the feasibility of this speed of sound and reflectivity reconstruction technique. These simulations are carried out using both synthetic focus method and exact wave equation simulation data. The noise effects in these simulations are also considered.