Redatuming of 2-D Wavefields Measured on an Arbitrary-Shaped Closed Aperture

Whole breast ultrasound scanning systems are used to screen a women’s breast for suspicious lesions. Typically, the transducers are located at fixed positions at relatively large distances from the breast to avoid any contact with the breast. Unfortunately, these large distances give rise to large spatial domains to be imaged. These large domains hamper the applicability of imaging by inversion. To reduce the size of the spatial computational domain, we present a two-dimensional redatuming method based on Hankel decomposition of the measured field. With this method, the field measured over an arbitrary-shaped closed curve can be redatumed to a new curve enclosing a smaller spatial domain. Additional advantages of the proposed method are that it allows to account for the finite size and orientation of a transducer and that it is robust to noise. The proposed method is successfully validated using synthetic and measured data and the results show that the recorded field can be redatumed to any position in the embedding.