Extraction of weak crack signals based on sparse code shrinkage combined with wavelet packet filtering

Early crack signals in critical infrastructure components of major equipment are hardly to be extracted due to its low signal noise ratio (SNR). A de-noising method combined wavelet packet (WP) technology with sparse code shrinkage (SCS) is proposed in this study. Firstly, WP reconstruction technology is used to reserve the crack signal with a specified frequency range. That is, the signal is decomposed by Meyer wavelet into five layers, and the signal with the frequency range from 187.5 kHz to 609.375 kHz is reserved. Then SCS method removes noise within the specified frequency range. Namely, the probability density function (PDF) of the signal independent coefficients is estimated via the generalized Gaussian model (GGM) in the independent component analysis (ICA) space. The nonlinear de-noising is finished by utilizing maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate. The results obtained by the combined method are compared with those generated by the SCS method and the WP de-noising method. It demonstrates that the combined method is the best one among the three methods in extracting weak signals. Its output SNR is −2.38 dB and the correlation coefficient (CC) is 0.54 when the input SNR is −20 dB. They are higher than those obtained by the SCS method (SNR −4.46 dB and CC 0.51). The WP method is the worst (SNR −3.54 dB and CC −0.003). Therefore, the combined method is quite suitable for weak signal extraction.     

Ultrasound frame rate requirements for cardiac elastography: experimental and in vivo results

Cardiac elastography using radiofrequency echo signals can provide improved 2D strain information compared to B-mode image data, provided data are acquired at sufficient frame rates. In this paper, we evaluate ultrasound frame rate requirements for unbiased and robust estimation of tissue displacements and strain. Both tissue-mimicking phantoms under cyclic compressions at rates that mimic the contractions of the heart and in vivo results are presented. Sinusoidal compressions were applied to the phantom at frequencies ranging from 0.5 to 3.5 cycles/sec, with a maximum deformation of 5% of the phantom height. Local displacements and strains were estimated using both a two-step one-dimensional and hybrid two-dimensional cross-correlation method. Accuracy and repeatability of local strains were assessed as a function of the ultrasound frame rate based on signal-to-noise ratio values.The maximum signal-to-noise ratio obtained in a uniformly elastic phantom is 20 dB for both a 1.26 Hz and a 2 Hz compression frequency when the radiofrequency echo acquisition is at least 12 Hz and 20 Hz respectively. However, for compression frequencies of 2.8 Hz and 4 Hz the maximum signal-to-noise ratio obtained is around 16 dB even for a 40 Hz frame rate. Our results indicate that unbiased estimation of displacements and strain require ultrasound frame rates greater than ten times the compression frequency, although a frame rate of about two times the compression frequency is sufficient to estimate the compression frequency imparted to the tissue-mimicking phantom. In vivo results derived from short-axis views of the heart acquired from normal human volunteers also demonstrate this frame rate requirement for elastography.     

Development of a portable 3D ultrasound imaging system for musculoskeletal tissues

3D ultrasound is a promising imaging modality for clinical diagnosis and treatment monitoring. Its cost is relatively low in comparison with CT and MRI, no intensive training and radiation protection is required for its operation, and its hardware is movable and can potentially be portable. In this study, we developed a portable freehand 3D ultrasound imaging system for the assessment of musculoskeletal body parts. A portable ultrasound scanner was used to obtain real-time B-mode ultrasound images of musculoskeletal tissues and an electromagnetic spatial sensor was fixed on the ultrasound probe to acquire the position and orientation of the images. The images were digitized with a video digitization device and displayed with its orientation and position synchronized in real-time with the data obtained by the spatial sensor. A program was developed for volume reconstruction, visualization, segmentation and measurement using Visual C++ and Visualization toolkits (VTK) software. A 2D Gaussian filter and a Median filter were implemented to improve the quality of the B-scan images collected by the portable ultrasound scanner. An improved distance-weighted grid-mapping algorithm was proposed for volume reconstruction. Temporal calibrations were conducted to correct the delay between the collections of images and spatial data. Spatial calibrations were performed using a cross-wire phantom. The system accuracy was validated by one cylinder and two cuboid phantoms made of silicone. The average errors for distance measurement in three orthogonal directions in comparison with micrometer measurement were 0.06 ± 0.39, −0.27 ± 0.27, and 0.33 ± 0.39 mm, respectively. The average error for volume measurement was −0.18% ± 5.44% for the three phantoms. The system has been successfully used to obtain the volume images of a fetus phantom, the fingers and forearms of human subjects. For a typical volume with 126 × 103 × 109 voxels, the 3D image could be reconstructed from 258 B-scans (640 × 480 pixels) within one minute using a portable PC with Pentium IV 2.4 GHz CPU and 512 MB memories. It is believed that such a portable volume imaging system will have many applications in the assessment of musculoskeletal tissues because of its easy accessibility.     

Feasibility of using ultrasound contrast agents to increase the size of thermal lesions induced by non-focused transducers: in vitro demonstration in tissue mimicking phantom

Miniature flat ultrasound transducers have shown to be effective for a large variety of thermal therapies, but the associated superficial heating implicates developing original strategies in order to extend therapeutic depth. The goal of the present paper is to use ultrasound contrast agents (UCA) to increase remote attenuation and heating. Theoretical simulations demonstrated that increasing attenuation from 0.27 to 0.8 Np/cm at 10 MHz beyond a distance of 18 mm from the transducer should result in longer thermal damages due to protein coagulation in a tissue mimicking phantom. Contrast agents (BR14, Bracco, Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland) were embedded in thermo-sensitive gel and attenuations ranging from 0.27 to 1.33 Np/cm were measured at 10 MHz for concentrations of BR14 between 0 and 4.8%. Thermal damages were then induced in several gels, which had different layering configurations. Thermal damages, 12.8 mm in length, were obtained in homogeneous gels. When mixing contrast agents at a concentration of 3.2% beyond a first 18 mm-thick layer of homogeneous gel, the thermal damages reached 21.5 mm in length. This work demonstrated that contrast agents can be used for increasing attenuation remotely and extending therapeutic depth induced by a non-focused transducer. Additional work must be done in vivo in order to verify the remote-only distribution of bubbles and associated increase in attenuation.     

Distributed Brillouin fiber sensing based on spectrum line fitting and wavelet packet denoising

A novel signal processing method is proposed to improve the spatial resolution, frequency resolution and dynamic characteristics of BOTDR. For the BOTDR system with 50 ns pump pulse, by using spectrum line fitting technology based on Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm, the spatial resolution is improved from 5 m to 5 cm. Combination of LM fitting algorithm, a large frequency scanning interval is adopted without sacrificing measurement accuracy of the BOTDR system. It reduces the number of sampling points of Brillouin spectrum significantly. So, the fitting speed is improved greatly. This is the first time using a large scan interval to increase the spectrum line fitting speed. To improve the fitting speed, the difference between the reference and measured spectrum is used to estimate the variation of Brillouin frequency shift. The measured amplitude of Brillouin spectrum is used to estimate the width of region strain occurred. Finally, by using wavelet packet denoising technology, the spectra containing noise are fitted successfully.     

An optical mm-wave generation scheme by frequency octupling using a nested MMI

A novel method of a filterless optical millimeter-wave (MMW) signal generation with frequency octupling via a nested multimode interference (MMI) coupler is proposed for Radio-over-fiber systems. By setting the DC bias voltage applied to the central arms of MMI-b and MMI-c accurately, the optical carrier can be completely suppressed. The OSSR can be as high as about 58 dB without optical filter and the radio frequency spurious suppression ratio (RFSSR) exceeds 32 dB, which is the best result as we know. Simulation results suggest that when the generated optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the standard single-mode fiber, the eye diagram is still opened after being transmitted over a 50 km fiber.     

Pulse compression technique for simultaneous HIFU surgery and ultrasonic imaging: a preliminary study

In an ultrasound image-guided High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) surgery, reflected HIFU waves received by an imaging transducer should be suppressed for real-time simultaneous imaging and therapy. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of pulse compression scheme combined with notch filtering in order to minimize these HIFU interference signals. A chirp signal modulated by the Dolph-Chebyshev window with 3-9 MHz frequency sweep range is used for B-mode imaging and 4 MHz continuous wave is used for HIFU. The second order infinite impulse response notch filters are employed to suppress reflected HIFU waves whose center frequencies are 4 MHz and 8 MHz. The prototype integrated HIFU/imaging transducer that composed of three rectangular elements with a spherically con-focused aperture was fabricated. The center element has the ability to transmit and receive 6 MHz imaging signals and two outer elements are only used for transmitting 4 MHz continuous HIFU wave. When the chirp signal and 4 MHz HIFU wave are simultaneously transmitted to the target, the reflected chirp signals mixed with 4 MHz and 8 MHz HIFU waves are detected by the imaging transducer. After the application of notch filtering with pulse compression process, HIFU interference waves in this mixed signal are significantly reduced while maintaining original imaging signal. In the single scanline test using a strong reflector, the amplitude of the reflected HIFU wave is reduced to −45 dB. In vitro test, with a sliced porcine muscle shows that the speckle pattern of the restored B-mode image is close to that of the original image. These preliminary results demonstrate the potential for the pulse compression scheme with notch filtering to achieve real-time ultrasound image-guided HIFU surgery.     

Denoising of quadrature ultrasound Doppler signal from bi-directional flow based on matching pursuit

Denoising of Doppler signal is a preliminary and important step in medical ultrasound imaging. To denoise quadrature Doppler signal from bi-directional flow, we propose a novel method based on matching pursuit in this paper. The proposed method is an iterative decomposition algorithm which decomposes the original Doppler signal into a linear expansion of atoms in a time-frequency dictionary. The time-frequency dictionary is similar to Fourier transform domain and the atoms are similar to orthogonal bases in Fourier transform. In each step of the iteration, the atom which gives the largest inner product with the analyzed signal is selected from the dictionary, and the contribution of this atom is subtracted from the Doppler signal. This process is repeated on the residue until the SNR reaches the maximum. The linear expansion of the selected atoms is the denoised signal. Simulations were conducted on a simulation model with a sampling rate of 12.8 kHz. When the original SNRs are 0 dB, 2 dB, 4 dB, 6 dB, 8 dB, 10 dB, the proposed method can improve the SNR for 7.9 dB, 7.8 dB, 7.5 dB, 7.3 dB, 7.05 dB, 6.8 dB respectively, reduce the root mean square error (RMSE) of the mean frequency waveform to 0.0441 kHz, 0.0303 kHz, 0.0245 kHz, 0.0215 kHz, 0.0161 kHz, 0.0125 kHz respectively, and suppress the RMSE of the spectral width waveform to 0.1774 kHz, 0.0591 kHz, 0.0486 kHz, 0.0170 kHz, 0.0145 kHz, 0.0117 kHz respectively. Preliminary in vivo evaluation was also carried out on a healthy 33-year-old male using B-K medical A/S 3535 ultrasound scanner, and the results showed that the proposed method can effectively enhance the Doppler spectrogram.     

Investigation of dental samples using a 35MHz focussed ultrasound piezocomposite transducer

Dental erosion and decay are increasingly prevalent but as yet there is no quantitative monitoring tool. Such a tool would allow earlier diagnosis and treatment and ultimately the prevention of more serious disease and pain. Despite ultrasound having been demonstrated as a method of probing the internal structures of teeth more than 40 years ago, development of a clinical tool has been slow. The aim of the study reported here was to investigate the use of a novel high frequency ultrasound transducer and validate it using a known dental technique.A tooth extracted for clinical reasons was sectioned to provide a sample that contained an enamel and dentine layer such that the enamel-dentine junction (EDJ) was of a varying depth. The sample was then submerged in water and a B-scan recorded using a custom-designed piezocomposite ultrasound transducer with a centre frequency of 35 MHz and a −6 dB bandwidth of 24 MHz.The transducer has an axial resolution of 180 μm and a spatial resolution of 110 μm, a significant advance on previous work using lower frequencies. The depth of the EDJ was measured from the resulting data set and compared to measurements from the sequential grinding and imaging (SGI) method.The B-scan showed that the EDJ was of varying depth. Subsequently, the EDJ measurements were found to have a correlation of 0.89 (p < 0.01) against the SGI measurements. The results indicate that high frequency ultrasound is capable of measuring enamel thickness to an accuracy of within 10% of the total enamel thickness, whereas currently there is no clinical tool available to measure enamel thickness.     

A novel power spectrum calculation method using phase-compensation and weighted averaging for the estimation of ultrasound attenuation

An estimation of ultrasound attenuation in soft tissues is critical in the quantitative ultrasound analysis since it is not only related to the estimations of other ultrasound parameters, such as speed of sound, integrated scatterers, or scatterer size, but also provides pathological information of the scanned tissue. However, estimation performances of ultrasound attenuation are intimately tied to the accurate extraction of spectral information from the backscattered radiofrequency (RF) signals. In this paper, we propose two novel techniques for calculating a block power spectrum from the backscattered ultrasound signals. These are based on the phase-compensation of each RF segment using the normalized cross-correlation to minimize estimation errors due to phase variations, and the weighted averaging technique to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The simulation results with uniform numerical phantoms demonstrate that the proposed method estimates local attenuation coefficients within 1.57% of the actual values while the conventional methods estimate those within 2.96%. The proposed method is especially effective when we deal with the signal reflected from the deeper depth where the SNR level is lower or when the gated window contains a small number of signal samples. Experimental results, performed at 5 MHz, were obtained with a one-dimensional 128 elements array, using the tissue-mimicking phantoms also show that the proposed method provides better estimation results (within 3.04% of the actual value) with smaller estimation variances compared to the conventional methods (within 5.93%) for all cases considered.     

A preliminary in vitro assessment of polymer-shelled microbubbles in contrast-enhanced ultrasound imaging

This paper focuses on the use of poly (vinyl alcohol)-shelled microbubbles as a contrast agent in ultrasound medical imaging. The objective was an in vitro assessment of the different working conditions and signal processing methods for the visual detection (especially in small vessels) of such microbubbles, while avoiding their destruction. Polymer-shelled microbubbles have recently been proposed as ultrasound contrast agents with some important advantages. The major drawback is a shell that is less elastic than that of the traditional lipidic microbubbles. Weaker echoes are expected, and their detection at low concentrations may be critical. In vitro experiments were performed with a commercial ultrasound scanner equipped with a dedicated acquisition board. A concentration of 100 bubbles/mm³, excitation pressure amplitudes from 120 kPa to 320 kPa, and a central frequency of 3 MHz or 4.5 MHz were used. Three multi-pulse techniques (i.e., pulse inversion, contrast pulse sequence based on three transmitted signals, and contrast pulse sequence in combination with the chirp pulse) were compared. The results confirmed that these microbubbles produce a weaker ultrasound response than lipidic bubbles with a reduced second-order nonlinear component. Nevertheless, these microbubbles can be detected by the contrast pulse sequence technique, especially when the chirp pulse is adopted. The best value of the contrast-to-tissue ratio was obtained at an excitation pressure amplitude of 230 kPa: although this pressure amplitude is higher than what is typically used for lipidic microbubbles, it does not cause the rupture of the polymeric contrast agent.     

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber system using direct modulation laser to generate optical millimeter-wave and wavelength reuse for uplink connection

In this paper, we present a full-duplex radio-over-fiber system incorporating both optical millimeter-wave (mm-wave) generation and wavelength reuse for uplink connection. The optical double sidebands (DSB) signal is generated by using only one inexpensive broadband direct modulation laser (DML), to which a mixing RF signal is applied. An optical interleaver is then used to separate the first-order optical sidebands from the optical carrier of optical DSB signal. The separated first-order optical sidebands are beat to generate mm-wave signal that has double the frequency of the RF drive signal, while the separated optical carrier is reused as light source to remodulate uplink signal. Both detailed theoretical analysis and experiments to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed system are presented. Experiment result shows that the bidirectional 2.5 Gb/s data can be successfully transmitted over 40 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with less than 2 dB power penalty.     

64 GHz optical millimeter-wave generation by octupling 8 GHz local oscillator via a nested LiNbO3 modulator

A novel scheme to generate a 64 GHz optical millimeter (mm)-wave via a nested LiNbO₃ Mach-Zehnder modulator with an 8 GHz local oscillator is proposed and simulated. Since the frequency response of the modulator and the local oscillator frequency are greatly reduced, the bandwidth requirements of the optical and electrical components in the transmitter are significantly decreased. The simulation results show that the generated optical mm-wave signal maintains good performance even after being transmitted over 20 km standard single-mode fiber.     

The preliminary evaluation of a 1 MHz ultrasound probe for measuring the elastic anisotropy of human cortical bone

Our objective is to evaluate an ultrasound probe for measurements of velocity and anisotropy in human cortical bone (tibia). The anisotropy of cortical bone is a known and mechanically relevant property in the context of osteoporotic fracture risk. Current in vivo quantitative ultrasound devices measuring the velocity of ultrasound in long bones can only be applied in the axial direction. For anisotropy measurements a second direction for velocity measurements preferably perpendicular to the axial direction is necessary. We developed a new ultrasound probe which permits axial transmission measurements with a simultaneous second perpendicular direction (tangential). Anisotropy measurements were performed on isotropic and anisotropic phantoms and two excised human female tibiae (age 63 and 82). Anisotropy ratios (AI; ratio of squared ultrasound velocities in the two directions) were for the isotropic phantom 1.06 ± 0.01 and for the anisotropic phantom 1.14 ± 0.03 (mean ± standard deviation). AI was 1.83 ± 0.29 in the tibia from the older donor and 1.37 ± 0.18 in the tibia from the younger donor. The AIs were in the expected range and differed significantly (p < 0.05, t-test) between the tibiae. Measured sound velocities were reproducible (mean standard deviation of short time precision of both channels for phantom measurements 31 m/s) and in agreement with reported velocities of the phantom material. Our results document the feasibility of anisotropy measurements at long bones using a single probe. Further improvements in the design of the probe and tests in vivo are warranted. If this approach can be evaluated in vivo an additional tool for assessing the bone status is available for clinical use.     

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber link with 12-tupling mm-wave generation and wavelength reuse for upstream signal

A full-duplex radio-over-fiber (RoF) link with a novel scheme to generate 60 GHz mm-waves from a 5 GHz RF signal source is investigated. In the RoF downlink, the required frequency of the RF oscillator is reduced greatly. Since the optical carrier is not modulated by downstream data, part of it is reused to carry upstream data and the upstream data is transmitted to the central station using optical single-sideband modulation. In this way, a single wavelength is used for both downstream and upstream transmissions. Based on this scheme, a full-duplex RoF link is built and its transmission performance is analyzed. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulation show that the downstream signal cannot only eliminate code form distortion caused by time shift of the code edges, but also reduce the influence of the fading effect as the 60 GHz DSB optical mm-wave signal is transmitted along the fiber, and the upstream signal is immune to both fading effect and time shift of the code edges.     

Arbitrary shaped, liquid filled reverberators with non-resonant transducers for broadband focusing of ultrasound using Time Reversed Acoustics

The ability to generate short focused ultrasonic pulses with duration on the order of one period of carrier frequency depends on the bandwidth of the transmitter as the pulse duration is inversely proportional to the bandwidth. Conventional focusing arrays used for focusing ultrasound have limited bandwidth due to the resonant nature of the piezoelements generating ultrasound. Theoretically it is possible to build a broadband phased array composed of “non-resonant” elements: wedge-shaped or flat-concave piezotransducers, though there are numerous technical difficulties in designing arrays with hundreds of elements of complex shape. This task is much easier to realize in an alternative technique of ultrasound focusing based on the principles of Time Reversed Acoustics (TRA) because in TRA systems, effective focusing can be achieved with just a few, or even one, transducers. The goal of this study is to demonstrate the possibility of broadband focusing of ultrasonic waves using a TRA system with non-resonant transducers and to explore the factors affecting the performance of such a system. A new type of TRA reverberators, such as water-filled thin-wall plastic vessels, which can be used with the submersible piezotransducers fixed internally in the reverberator, are proposed and tested. The experiments are conducted in a water tank with the walls and bottom covered by a sound absorbing lining. A needle hydrophone mounted on a 3D positioning system is used as a beacon for the TRA focusing and then for measuring the spatial distribution of the focused ultrasound field. The bandwidth and spatial distribution of the signal focused by the TRA system using a single channel with the resonant versus non-resonant transducers have been analyzed. Two types of non-resonant transducers were tested: a flat-concave transducer with a diameter of 30 mm, and a thickness varying from 2 mm in the center to 11 mm at the edge, and a specially designed submersible transducer having an uneven shape with a diameter of about 25 mm and a thickness varying from 2 to 6 mm. It was shown that TRA focusing system using non-resonant transducer had a bandwidth at 10 dB of 500 kHz while the resonant transducer provided about 100 kHz bandwidth. Correspondingly, the extended bandwidth of the TRA focusing system, especially toward higher frequencies, provides a 50% sharper spatial distribution. Furthermore, the relative level of the background ultrasound was reduced by a factor up to 3 as more frequencies were added coherently in focus and incoherently out of focus. Advantages of water-filled reverberators made of thin-wall plastic vessels include easy manufacturing, low costs, extreme simplicity, and good acoustical matching with soft tissues, important for biomedical applications.     

Influence of temperature variations on the entropy and correlation of the Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix from B-Mode images

In this work, the feasibility of texture parameters extracted from B-Mode images were explored in quantifying medium temperature variation. The goal is to understand how parameters obtained from the gray-level content can be used to improve the actual state-of-the-art methods for non-invasive temperature estimation (NITE). B-Mode images were collected from a tissue mimic phantom heated in a water bath. The phantom is a mixture of water, glycerin, agar-agar and graphite powder. This mixture aims to have similar acoustical properties to in vivo muscle. Images from the phantom were collected using an ultrasound system that has a mechanical sector transducer working at 3.5 MHz. Three temperature curves were collected, and variations between 27 and 44 °C during 60 min were allowed. Two parameters (correlation and entropy) were determined from Grey-Level Co-occurrence Matrix (GLCM) extracted from image, and then assessed for non-invasive temperature estimation. Entropy values were capable of identifying variations of 2.0 °C. Besides, it was possible to quantify variations from normal human body temperature (37 °C) to critical values, as 41 °C. In contrast, despite correlation parameter values (obtained from GLCM) presented a correlation coefficient of 0.84 with temperature variation, the high dispersion of values limited the temperature assessment.     

Adaptive field-of-view imaging for efficient receive beamforming in medical ultrasound imaging systems

Quadrature demodulation-based phase rotation beamforming (QD-PRBF) is commonly used to support dynamic receive focusing in medical ultrasound systems. However, it is computationally demanding since it requires two demodulation filters for each receive channel. To reduce the computational requirements of QD-PRBF, we have previously developed two-stage demodulation (TSD), which reduces the number of lowpass filters by performing demodulation filtering on summation signals. However, it suffers from image quality degradation due to aliasing at lower beamforming frequencies. To improve the performance of TSD-PRBF with reduced number of beamforming points, we propose a new adaptive field-of-view (AFOV) imaging method. In AFOV imaging, the beamforming frequency is adjusted depending on displayed FOV size and the center frequency of received signals. To study its impact on image quality, simulation was conducted using Field II, phantom data were acquired from a commercial ultrasound machine, and the image quality was quantified using spatial (i.e., axial and lateral) and contrast resolution. The developed beamformer (i.e., TSD-AFOV-PRBF) with 1024 beamforming points provided comparable image resolution to QD-PRBF for typical FOV sizes (e.g., 4.6% and 1.3% degradation in contrast resolution for 160 mm and 112 mm, respectively for a 3.5 MHz transducer). Furthermore, it reduced the number of operations by 86.8% compared to QD-PRBF. These results indicate that the developed TSD-AFOV-PRBF can lower the computational requirement for receive beamforming without significant image quality degradation.     

High power nonuniform linear vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser array with a Gaussian far-field distribution

A 980 nm bottom-emitting vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array with a nonuniform linear arrangement is reported to realize high power with a Gaussian far-field distribution. This array is composed of five symmetrically-arranged elements of 200 μm, 150 μm, and 100 μm diameters, with the center spacing of 300 μm and 250 μm respectively. This structure makes it possible to discriminate against the higher order array supermodes. The theoretical simulation of the far-field distribution is in good agreement with the experimental result. An output power of 880 mW with a power density of 1 KW/cm² is obtained. The divergence angle is below 20° in the range of operating current from 0 A to 4 A. The comparison between this nonuniform linear array and the conventional two-dimensional array is carried out to demonstrate the good performance of the linear array. A peak power of over 20 W is achieved under a short pulsed operation with a repetition frequency of 1 kHz.     

In vitro estimation of mean sound speed based on minimum average phase variance in medical ultrasound imaging

Effective receive beamforming in medical ultrasound imaging is important for enhancing spatial and contrast resolution. In current ultrasound receive beamforming, a constant sound speed (e.g., 1540 m/s) is assumed. However, the variations of sound speed in soft tissues could introduce phase distortions, leading to degradation in spatial and contrast resolution. This degradation becomes even more severe in imaging fatty tissues (e.g., breast) and with obese patients. In this paper, a mean sound speed estimation method where phase variance of radio-frequency channel data in the region of interest is evaluated is presented for improving spatial and contrast resolution. The proposed estimation method was validated by the Field II simulation and the tissue mimicking phantom experiments. In the simulation, the sound speed of the medium was set to 1450 m/s and the proposed method was capable of capturing this value correctly. From the phantom experiments, the −18-dB lateral resolution of the point target at 50 mm obtained with the estimated mean sound speed was improved by a factor of 1.3, i.e., from 3.9 mm to 2.9 mm. The proposed estimation method also provides an improvement of 0.4 in the contrast-to-noise ratio, i.e., from 2.4 to 2.8. These results indicate that the proposed mean sound speed estimation method could enhance the spatial and contrast resolution in the medical ultrasound imaging systems.