Ricerc@Sapienza

The aim of this project is to contribute to the improvement of the ultrasonic tomography techniques for non-destructive inspection and image reconstruction of structures and materials relevant to civil and mechanical engineering. Tomography is the process of imaging a cross-section of some solid. It enables to see through the objects instead of making real cuts, therefore, it has important applications in the medical field and in non-destructive structural health monitoring. The Radon transform and its generalization have played a significant role in the development of various imaging techniques. The ordinary Radon transform has been the foundation of the mathematical model of conventional computed tomography. The inverse transform reconstructs the image of the object onto a plane: to reconstruct a 3D image, several slices are needed.
The main aim of this project is to formulate a novel imaging technique, which employs a 2D Radon transform, that is a projection onto a plane, whose inverse could enable the reproduction of a 3-D image of what is inside the scanned object. The project will cover the theoretical formulation and numerical (finite-elements) simulations to prove the feasibility of the approach proposed. Besides the improvement of the understanding of the inner content of a solid, the novel formulation proposed will require a reduced number of scans needed to perform a 3D image reconstruction in comparison with classical approaches, resulting in shorter acquisition and processing time.
In addition to the improvement of image reconstruction algorithms, one of this project¿s aims is also the development of quantitative tomographic imaging techniques based on coupled physics of waves. In coupled physics imaging, contrast and resolution originating from different physical phenomena are combined. In the project, it is envisaged to employ the thermoacoustic effect in addition to the classical ultrasonic wave response.