Seeing with Sound: Detecting Breast Cancer with Acoustic Tomography

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death among women. X-rays mammography is considered to be the gold standard for breast imaging. However, most cancerous lesions are missed for women with dense breast, due to poor sensitivity of a mammographic exam in the case of breast with moderate/high density. Together with the ionizing character of the x-ray radiation, this hampers the widespread use of x-ray mammography as a population screening tool. In this seminar, I will review recent attempts at detecting breast cancer with ultrasound computed tomography, with a particular emphasis on the deterministic and stochastic iterative imaging algorithms that employ the framework of a pde-constrained numerical optimization problem. The seminar will discuss the mathematics and the physics aspects of the acoustic wave equation and of the associated inverse problem, and it will briefly touch the engineering aspects of an ultrasound sensing device.

Venue: Fulton Building, Room G20