3D electroacoustic tomography image enhancement using deep learning with the SAM-Med3D encoder

<i>Objective.</i>To overcome the limitations of electroacoustic tomography (EAT) in clinical settings-particularly the artifacts and distortions caused by limited-angle data acquisition-and enable accurate, efficient visualization of electric field distributions for electroporation-based therapies.<i>Approach.</i>We developed a deep learning-based framework that enhances 3D EAT image reconstruction from single-view projections by leveraging the large foundation model (LFM) SAM-Med3D. The encoder was modified into a local-global feature fusion architecture that extracts multi-scale features from intermediate transformer layers, preserving fine structural details while maintaining computational efficiency. A lightweight decoder with progressive up-sampling and skip connections was employed to generate high-resolution images, addressing limitations of conventional U-Net architectures.<i>Main results.</i>We collected a dataset of 50 EAT scans-each with 120 views-for a total of 6000 views. These were acquired from water phantoms and tissue samples under varied electrode configurations and voltages, and split into training (30 scans, 3600 views), validation (10 scans, 1200 views), and testing (10 scans, 1200 views). Our model significantly outperformed baseline 3D U-Nets, achieving an RMSE of 0.0092, PSNR of 41.10, and SSIM of 0.9377. Remarkably, our method reconstructs a full-view 3D EAT image from a single view in just 2 s, demonstrating its potential for near real-time monitoring and adaptive dose verification in electroporation-based therapies.<i>Significance.</i>This is the first application of a LFM like SAM-Med3D for enhancing 3D EAT imaging. The proposed framework addresses the critical challenge of limited-angle data in EAT and demonstrates strong potential for improving precision and safety in electroporation-based therapies, thereby advancing the technique's clinical viability.