The Impact of Element Spatial Arrangement on Ultrasound Tomography: Experimental Results

Breast cancer has become one of the most common and lethal cancers in women worldwide. Ultrasound tomography (UST) is supposed to be an imaging method for early diagnosis of breast cancer. In the implementation of UST, operators usually need to compromise between the image quality and the complexity of scanning. In order to explore the relationship between them, a preliminary UST imaging system is designed and introduced in this paper. It uses two co-planar 128-element piezoelectric ultrasonic transducers as transmitter and receiver respectively, each of which can rotate freely in the horizontal plane. Based on this prototype, a series of experiments with different scanning patterns are designed, the corresponding signal completeness are calculated, and the imaging results are compared.