Ultrasound Tomography of Musculoskeletal Tissues with Generative Neural Physics
Ultrasound Tomography (UT) is a radiation-free, high-resolution modality, but remains limited for musculoskeletal imaging due to the high computational cost and instability of full-waveform inversion in strongly scattering media. We propose a generative neural physics framework that couples generative networks with physics-informed neural simulation for fast, high-fidelity 3D UT. By learning a compact surrogate of ultrasonic wave propagation from a limited set of cross-modality images, our method merges the accuracy of wave modeling with the efficiency and stability of deep learning. This enables accurate quantitative imaging of in vivo musculoskeletal tissues, producing spatial maps of acoustic properties beyond reflection-mode images. On synthetic and in vivo data of breasts, arms, and legs, we reconstruct 3D maps of tissue parameters in under ten minutes, with sensitivity to acoustic variations in musculoskeletal tissues and resolution comparable to MRI. By overcoming computational bottlenecks in strongly scattering regimes, this approach demonstrates the feasibility of quantitative UT for musculoskeletal imaging and advances its development toward future routine clinical use.