Green’s function estimation in speckle using the decomposition of the time reversal operator: Application to aberration correction in medical imaging

The FDORT method (French acronym for decomposition of the time reversal operator using focused beams) is a time reversal based method that can detect point scatterers in a heterogeneous medium and extract their Green’s function. It is particularly useful when focusing in a heterogeneous medium. This paper generalizes the theory of the FDORT method to random media (speckle), and shows that it is possible to extract Green’s functions from the speckle signal using this method. Therefore it is possible to achieve a good focusing even if no point scatterers are present. Moreover, a link is made between FDORT and the Van Cittert–Zernike theorem. It is deduced from this interpretation that the normalized first eigenvalue of the focused time reversal operator is a well-known focusing criterion. The concept of an equivalent virtual object is introduced that allows the random problem to be replaced by an equivalent deterministic problem and leads to an intuitive understanding of FDORT in speckle. Applications to aberration correction are presented. The reduction of the variance of the Green’s function estimate is discussed. Finally, it is shown that the method works well in the presence of strong interfering scatterers.