An exploration of plug-and-play flow matching for full-waveform inversion on breast imaging

Full-waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs sound-speed fields from measured waveforms, by solving an optimization problem that minimizes the discrepancy between measured waveforms and those predicted by a numerical wave-propagation model. However, choosing suitable regularization for this optimization is challenging because it must stabilize the inversion while preserving relevant structures, prompting us to investigate whether priors learned from representative sound-speed images can improve reconstruction. In this work, we adapt plug-and-play flow matching (PnP-Flow) to FWI by alternating waveform-misfit updates with updates from a pretrained flow prior. We explore the effectiveness of PnP-Flow reconstruction by comparing it with total-variation (TV) regularization using noiseless transmission-only plane-wave data. Separate flow priors are trained on two circular-inclusion model families with constant and spatially varying backgrounds. We evaluate the method both on these in-distribution circle models and under substantial distribution shift by transferring the Gaussian-circle prior and reconstruction settings to breast phantom patches without retraining or retuning. Using the same number of waveform-misfit updates, the proposed PnP-Flow framework generally improves circle reconstruction accuracy and recovers breast lesion contrast more accurately than TV baselines.

Source: arXiv:2610.32185v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32185v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.32185v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32185v1