Ultrasound Tomography (UST) is an upcoming ultrasound modality which can generate high-resolution 3D images of acoustic tissue properties such as the speed-of-sound distribution. In particular for breast cancer imaging, this would provide extremely valuable additional diagnostic information at low operating costs without harm or discomfort to the patient. However, compared to X-ray CT, the image reconstruction is a much harder mathematical problem. I worked extensively on devising a computational strategy to improve this and recently described it in a paper in Inverse Problems. The next step is to produce first results for breast cancer patients.
Together with a network of colleagues from different Dutch universities, we are setting up the Dutch Inverse Problems Community - a network of researchers and professionals working in this field to increase its visibility within the applied mathematics community in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the kick-off meeting that we had organized for September 2020 at CWI due to the pandemic. The second attempt we organized a very successful two-day workshop in November 2021. Our long-term goal is to establish an annual meeting accompanied by smaller events and position CWI in the center of these activities.
Over the last years, I’ve been involved in a project to improve various aspects cone-beam CT imaging using deep learning. Recently, two more papers from this work were published. One in Physics in Medicine & Biology proposes an efficient dimension reduction workflow to reduce high cone angle artifacts while one in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine compares different neural network training strategies for image segmentation. Thanks to everyone involved, in particular to Jordi Minnema!
My colleague Nicola Viganò (now at ESRF) works on exciting new imaging techniques and recently got me involved in a project on developing X-ray plenoptic cameras (light-field imaging). Check out the corresponding paper, which got published recently. Big thanks to Nicola and everyone involved!