3-D high resolution images of ultrasonic transmission tomography compared to magnetic resonance and optical images

A high-resolution ultrasonic transmission tomography (HUTT) system has been newly developed with the critical innovations of using sub-millimeter transducer arrays and multi-band analysis of the first arrival pulse. The current HUTT system produces multi-band images from multi-band sinograms whose elements are obtained by discrete Fourier transform (DFT) of the first-arrival pulses at azimuthal, angular, and elevation positions of a scanning system. In this study, we present 3-D high-resolution HUTT images of a sheep kidney phantom along with their corresponding MRI and optical images in order to demonstrate the capacity of the current HUTT system for 3-D high-resolution transmission ultrasonic imaging. For enhanced visualization, 3-D multi-band HUTT image volumes are integrated into a single 3-D image volume using a novel image fusion method called local principal component analysis with a structure metric (LPCA-SM) and then co-registered to MRI and optical image volumes.