Abstract
The local speed of sound (SoS) of human soft tissues is a promising quantitative biomarker for the diagnosis of diseases such as breast cancer or fatty liver disease. One approach to estimate local SoS from pulse-echo ultrasound signals is the autofocusing method, which optimizes for the propagation model that best aligns beamformed signals recorded from different transmit–receive apertures. However, most pulse-echo autofocusing methods still rely on a straight-ray hypothesis, thus neglecting refraction effects occurring in heterogeneous media. To address this shortcoming, we introduce UltraBend, which replaces straight-line travel-time approximations with a refraction-aware bent-ray model for local SoS optimization. We compare our method with a state-of-the-art autofocusing method assuming straight-ray wave propagation and show that UltraBend reduces the mean absolute reconstruction SoS error relative to a straight-ray baseline on all evaluated phantoms, including a reduction from to on an inclusion phantom. These results suggest that improved modeling of wave propagation can substantially improve pulse-echo SoS imaging.
Links to Paper and Supplementary Materials
Main Paper (Open Access Version): https://papers.miccai.org/miccai-2026-sat/paper/ASMUS_039.pdf
SharedIt Link: Not yet available
SpringerLink (DOI): Not yet available
Supplementary Material: Not Submitted
Link to Open Review
Open Review Page: https://openreview.net/forum?id=CIJzoHelIa
BibTex
@InProceedings{DueFel_UltraBend_MICCAISAT2026,
author = { Duelmer, Felix AND Beuret, Samuel AND Frey, Benjamin N. AND Azampour, Mohammad Farid AND Navab, Nassir AND Dahl, Jeremy J.},
title = { { UltraBend: Refraction-Aware Propagation Modeling for Speed of Sound Imaging in Ultrasound } },
booktitle = {Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention -- MICCAI 2026 Workshops and Challenges},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Springer Nature Switzerland},
volume = {LNCS 17276},
month = {pending},
page = {pending}
}