Ultrasound tomography (UST) is being developed to address the limitations of mammography in breast cancer detection. Central to the success of UST is the possibility of obtaining high-resolution images of tissue mechanical properties across the whole breast. A recent paper [Huthwaite and Simonetti, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 130, 1721–1734 (2011)] made use of a numerical phantom to demonstrate that sufficient image resolution can be obtained by simply treating refraction and diffraction effects in consecutive steps through the combination of ray-based time of flight and diffraction tomography. This letter presents the first experimental demonstration of the method using phantom and invivo data from a cancer patient.

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