Optimal transport in transcranial ultrasound

This work applies optimal transport within transcranial ultrasound imaging and demonstrates the efficacy of this misfit function on a dataset collected for a tissue mimicking skull phantom. Transcranial ultrasound imaging approaches using full-waveform inversion have historically suffered from severe cycle skipping effects, particularly when starting the inversion from a homogeneous initial model. In order to overcome cycle skipping for this application, an optimal transport misfit function is used to reduce the non-convexity of the misfit landscape while significantly improving the prominence of relevant features within the gradients computed using the adjoint method. This misfit function, which accounts for mismatches in both amplitude and phase, is very well-suited for transcranial applications where the skull is absent from the initial model. This approach is demonstrated on a set of laboratory data collected for a tissue mimicking skull phantom.