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Constructing a physics-augmented digital twin of the skull is imperative for a wide range of transcranial ultrasound applications including ultrasound computed tomography and focused ultrasound therapy. The high impedance contrast as well as the acoustic-elastic coupling observed between soft tissue and bone increase the complexity of the ultrasound wavefield considerably, thus emphasizing the need for waveform-based inversion approaches. This work applies reverse time migration in conjunction with the spectral-element method to an in vitro human skull to obtain a starting model, which can be used for full-waveform inversion and adjoint-based shape optimization. Two distinct brain phantoms are considered where the cranial cavity of the in vitro human skull was filled with (1) homogeneous water and (2) gelatin with two cylindrical inclusions. A 2D slice through the posterior of the skull was collected using a ring-like aperture consisting of 1024 ultrasound transducers with a bandwidth of approximately 1MHz to 3MHz. Waveform-based reverse time migration was then used to resolve the inner and outer contours of the skull from which a conforming hexahedral finite-element mesh was constructed. The synthetically generated measurements which are obtained by solving the coupled acoustic-viscoelastic wave equation are in good agreement with the observed laboratory measurements. It is demonstrated that using this revised wave speed model for recomputing the reverse time migration reconstructions allows for improved localization of the gelatin inclusions within the cranial cavity.
Marty et al. (Mon,) studied this question.