Application of l1 Regularization for High-Quality Reconstruction of Ultrasound Tomography

– Ultrasound tomography based on inverse scattering has the capability to resolve structures which are smaller than the wavelength of the incident wave, as opposed to conventional ultrasound imaging using echo method. Some material properties such as sound contrast are very useful to detect small objects. Born Iterative Method (BIM) based on first-order Born approximation has been introduced as an efficient diffraction tomography approach. However, this method has a high complexity because it has to solve large iterative forward and inverse problems. In this paper, we propose to replace Tikhonov regularization by l1-regularized least squares problem (LSP) in solving the inverse problem in BIM. As a result, the quality of reconstruction is improved and the complexity is reduced.