What is the difference between detecting a gas reservoir and a breast tumour using ultrasound? From a mathematical point of view not that much; it are same field equations which describe the propagation and scattering of the field – only the applied frequency will show some differences.
In western Europe, one out of nine women is faced with breast cancers once in her life. Ultrasound is an emerging technology for detecting breast tumours as it is an efficient and harmless method which can detect also tumours in dense breasts which may be missed using mammography. Currently, several fully-automated ultrasound screening modalities are being developed, just like the USCT. For some of those systems, accurate knowledge about the transducer location is available, making the measured data suitable for imaging using non-linear inversion methods. In the past, many of these methods have been developed for characterizing and detecting oil & gas reservoirs. An example of these methods is the promising but costly inversion method referred to as contrast source inversion. During my presentation, I will discuss several imaging and inversion methods which are currently used or maybe used in the coming future.