Application of a maximum likelihood estimator in an experimental study in ultrasonic diffraction tomography.

A recently proposed approach to the inverse problem of detecting the presence and estimating the location of a known object from data collected in a set of diffraction tomographic experiments is evaluated. Experimental data are used to validate of the filtered backpropagation algorithms used, and their robustness to modeling errors and to severe limitations in the angular coverage of the tomographic data is demonstrated. A potential application to medical imaging of soft tissue is illustrated.