An Experimental Ultrasound Database for Tomographic Imaging

In the framework of non-destructive testing and imaging, ultrasound tomography can have an important role in several applications, especially in the biomedical field. The motivation beyond the use of this imaging technique lies in the possibility of obtaining quantitative imaging which is also operator-independent, conversely to conventional approaches. Thus, the need for public data sets for testing inverse scattering approaches is always persisting. To this aim, this paper introduces an experimental multiple-input-multiple-output ultrasound tomographic database whose acquisitions were performed by an air-matched in-house system designed and built by the Authors. The proposed database provides several cases with single and multiple objects of different shapes, sizes, and materials, to be imaged in laboratory-controlled conditions. Therefore, these scenarios can represent interesting options for the preliminary testing of tomographic ultrasound imaging approaches.