Detectability of breast lesions with CARI ultrasonography using a bioacoustic computational approach

Compared to other medical breast imaging techniques, ultrasonic imaging is more attractive due to its relatively low cost and wide clinical use. This study is concerned with clinical amplitude/velocity reconstruction imaging (CARI) ultrasonography for accurately detecting breast cancer using two acoustic properties: the sound speed and the attenuation. Bioacoustic modeling is used to describe ultrasound wave propagation in the breast/tumor system. The feasibility and the sensitivity of the CARI device are investigated using a finite-element time-domain approximation in tissue-mimicking breast. 2D and 3D simulation experiments show the detectability of small ellipse/ellipsoid-shaped tumors in terms of the increase in the sound speed in the tumor region. Our study confirms also that the FETD (finite-element time domain) method is a simple but robust tool to simulate the CARI device and other included clinical effects, such as focusing and scanning of the beams.