2025/11/20 by Ashkan Javaherian, Javaherian, Ashkan · 1 citation
Engineering · Medicine · #FOS: Physical sciences #I.4.5 #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #Microwave Imaging and Scattering Analysis #Ultrasonics and Acoustic Wave Propagation #Ultrasound Imaging and Elastography
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2511.16633
openalex publication_date 2025/11/20 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This study presents the first experimental validation of a Hessian-free ray-Born inversion technique for quantitative reconstruction of sound speed from transmission ultrasound data. The method combines single-scattering theory with high-frequency approximations, yielding an inversion framework well suited to the frequency ranges used in clinical ultrasound applications. Unlike previous singly-scattered inversion approaches that account for medium heterogeneities only in the scattering potential, the proposed ray-Born method employs Green's functions approximated along ray trajectories determined by high-frequency assumptions. The associated objective function is linearized and minimized sequentially across increasing frequency bands. At each frequency set, the linearized subproblem is solved using a weighting scheme applied to both the solution and data spaces, which diagonalizes the Hessian and enables its inversion in a single step. The method, previously reported and released as an open-source package, was applied to in-vitro and in-vivo datasets provided by the University of Rochester Medical Center. The reconstructed images were evaluated by comparison with those obtained using a full-wave inversion approach based on a frequency-domain Helmholtz solver. The results demonstrate the strong potential of the Hessian-free ray-Born inversion as a computationally efficient and accurate method suitable for clinical translation.