大功率限幅器的研制

介绍了一种L波段大功率限幅器的研制情况,该限幅器具有体积小、插入损耗小、输入承受功率高及限幅输出电平低等特点。文中给出了限幅二极管在高/低输入信号电平时的等效电路以及同轴滤波器的设计分析过程。实验测试结果表明,限幅器完全达到技术指标要求。     

Novel power MOSFET-based expander for high frequency ultrasound systems

The function of an expander is to obstruct the noise signal transmitted by the pulser so that it does not pass into the transducer or receive electronics, where it can produce undesirable ring-down in an ultrasound imaging application. The most common type is a diode-based expander, which is essentially a simple diode-pair, is widely used in pulse-echo measurements and imaging applications because of its simple architecture. However, diode-based expanders may degrade the performance of ultrasonic transducers and electronic components on the receiving and transmitting sides of the ultrasound systems, respectively. Since they are non-linear devices, they cause excessive signal attenuation and noise at higher frequencies and voltages. In this paper, a new type of expander that utilizes power MOSFET components, which we call a power MOSFET-based expander, is introduced and evaluated for use in high frequency ultrasound imaging systems. The performance of a power MOSFET-based expander was evaluated relative to a diode-based expander by comparing the noise figure (NF), insertion loss (IL), total harmonic distortion (THD), response time (RT), electrical impedance (EI) and dynamic power consumption (DPC). The results showed that the power MOSFET-based expander provided better NF (0.76 dB), IL (−0.3 dB) and THD (−62.9 dB), and faster RT (82 ns) than did the diode-based expander (NF (2.6 dB), IL (−1.4 dB), THD (−56.0 dB) and RT (119 ns)) at 70 MHz. The −6 dB bandwidth and the peak-to-peak voltage of the echo signal received by the transducer using the power MOSFET-based expander improved by 17.4% and 240% compared to the diode-based expander, respectively. The new power MOSFET-based expander was shown to yield lower NF, IL and THD, faster RT and lower ring down than the diode-based expander at the expense of higher dynamic power consumption.     

PZT厚膜及高频超声换能器的研究

近年来,基于PZT厚膜的超声换能器研究受到了广泛的重视。本文综述了PZT厚膜制备技术的发展情况,简要介绍了水下声纳和医用超声领域中PZT厚膜型高频超声换能器的应用研制进展。     

Estimation methods for flow imaging with high frequency ultrasound

This article proposes to estimate slow blood flow with high frequency ultrasound imaging. The proposed technique combines 2 methods. First, a statistical method, called Speckle Flow Imaging (SFI) based on the analysis of changes in the speckle pattern along time, gives an index directly related to the total velocity vector. Secondly, a block matching approach estimates the in-plane velocity components. Results on calibrated flow sequences of blood mimicking fluid have shown good agreement with the statistical model. The quantification of flow is achieved with pulsed flow and is also angle independent when the flow is perpendicular to the ultrasound beam. Speckle Tracking has been evaluated on the same data and has shown good estimation of the in-plane velocity vector when the component of velocity perpendicular to the imaging plane is inferior to 1mm/s. The results of these two methods permit the evaluation of the total 3D velocity field and the orthogonal velocity component relative to the imaging plane. This allows the quantification of blood flow (volumetric per time unit across the sequence).     

Parameter optimization of pulse compression in ultrasound imaging systems with coded excitation

A linear array imaging system with coded excitation is considered, where the proposed excitation/compression scheme maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and minimizes sidelobes at the output of the compression filter. A pulse with linear frequency modulation (LFM) is used for coded excitation. The excitation/compression scheme is based on the fast digital mismatched filtering. The parameter optimization of the excitation/compression scheme includes (i) choice of an optimal filtering function for the mismatched filtering; (ii) choice of an optimal window function for tapering of the chirp amplitude; (iii) optimization of a chirp-to-transducer bandwidth ratio; (iv) choice of an appropriate n-bit quantizer. The simulation results show that the excitation/compression scheme can be implemented as a Dolph–Chebyshev filter including amplitude tapering of the chirp with a Lanczos window. An example of such an optimized system is given where the chirp bandwidth is chosen to be 2.5 times the transducer bandwidth and equals 6 MHz: The sidelobes are suppressed to −80 dB, for a central frequency of 4 MHz, and to −94 dB, for a central frequency of 8 MHz. The corresponding improvement of the SNR is 18 and 21 dB, respectively, when compared to a conventional short pulse imaging system. Simulation of B-mode images demonstrates the advantage of coded excitation systems of detecting regions with low contrast.     

Accuracy preserving limiter for the high-order accurate solution of the Euler equations

Higher-order finite-volume methods have been shown to be more efficient than second-order methods. However, no consensus has been reached on how to eliminate the oscillations caused by solution discontinuities. Essentially non-oscillatory (ENO) schemes provide a solution but are computationally expensive to implement and may not converge well for steady-state problems. This work studies the extension of limiters used for second-order methods to the higher-order case. Requirements for accuracy and efficient convergence are discussed. A new limiting procedure is proposed. Ringleb’s flow problem is used to demonstrate that nearly nominal orders of accuracy for schemes up to fourth-order can be achieved in smooth regions using the new limiter. Results for the fourth-order accurate solution of transonic flow demonstrates good convergence properties and significant qualitative improvement of the solution relative the second-order method. The new limiter can also be successfully applied to reduce the dissipation of second-order schemes with minimal sacrifices in convergence properties relative to existing approaches.     

超声检测用窄脉冲探头高阻抗背衬的研制

利用一种简单的压力装置，制作与PZT压电晶片匹配的背衬块，最高声阻抗可达25．1×106kg·m-2·s－1用于试制窄脉冲探头，可以实现1.5周期的脉冲．     

Theoretical modelling of frequency dependent elastic loss in composite piezoelectric transducers

The large number of degrees of freedom in the design of piezoelectric transducers requires a theoretical model that is computationally efficient so that a large number of iterations can be performed in the design optimisation. The materials used are often lossy, and indeed loss can be used to enhance the operational characteristics of these designs. Motivated by these needs, this paper extends the one-dimensional linear systems model to incorporate frequency dependent elastic loss. The reception sensitivity, electrical impedance and electromechanical coupling coefficient of a 1–3 composite transducer, with frequency dependent loss in the polymer filler, are investigated. By plotting these operating characteristics as a function of the volume fraction of piezoelectric ceramic an optimum design is obtained. A device with a non-standard, high shear attenuation polymer is also simulated and this leads to an increase in the electromechanical coupling coefficient. A comparison with finite element simulations is then performed. This shows that the two methods are in reasonable agreement in their electrical impedance profiles in all the cases considered. The plots are almost identical away from the main resonant peak where the frequency location of the peaks are comparable but there is in some cases a 20% discrepancy in the magnitude of the peak value and in its bandwidth. The finite element model also shows that the use of a high shear attenuation polymer filler damps out the unwanted, low frequency modes whilst maintaining a reasonable impedance magnitude.     

Growth and size control in anti-solvent crystallization of glycine with high frequency ultrasound

Antisolvent crystallization of glycine was performed under ultrasonic irradiation of 1.6 MHz. The irradiation enhanced both the growth of α-glycine crystal and the uniformity in the crystal size. The degree of both enhancement effects increased with increasing ultrasonic power. While under the irradiation of 20 kHz ultrasound, no growth enhancement was observed, but the crystal size reduced as was reported in the literature. To elucidate the mechanism of growth enhancement, another experiment was designed and conducted to avoid the effect of nucleation from the sonocrystallization. The result suggests that the ultrasound enhances the incorporation of microcrystals to larger crystals. Probably, the collision between solid particles is intensified by the disturbance characterized by the high frequency ultrasound. The crystal growth was modeled with an apparent reaction of microcrystal and larger crystal. The result of the growth experiment was successfully predicted with a rate equation for pseudo first order reaction with a single parameter of rate constant. The rate constant linearly increased with the ultrasonic power. The analysis enables quantitative evaluation of the ultrasonic effect on the crystal growth.     

Schlieren metrology for high frequency medical ultrasound

The increased use of medical ultrasound above 40 MHz poses the challenge of measuring beam features that may be less than 40 microm. We have successfully used the optical Schlieren technique for transducers operating as high as 110 MHz. After a brief discussion of the technique, results are presented, including comparisons to state-of-the-art hydrophones and wire targets.     

A theoretical analysis of a piezoelectric ultrasound device with an active matching layer

This paper investigates the use of magnetically active materials in the matching layer of a piezoelectric transducer. This then allows the performance of the device to be dynamically altered by applying an external field. The effect that this new matching layer has on the performance of a typical device is theoretically investigated here. It transpires that the additional flexibility of an active matching layer can be used to maintain the efficiency of the device as the external load is varied.     

超声振动系统频率自动跟踪的模糊控制算法研究

针对大功率超声应用中,工作频带窄、频率跟踪速度要求快的特点,提出将模糊控制智能算法（Fuzzy Control）和数字频率直接合成技术（DDS）相结合的频率自动跟踪方案,依据经验归纳制定模糊控制器来快速跟踪工作频率,将驱动频率调节至谐振频率附近;随后只采用DDS进行频率的微调节,使得电源频率工作在超声换能器的谐振频率点上。最后,通过在MATLAB软件中对控制算法进行验证,表明本文算法具有可行性,能够实现对大功率超声波电源的频率自动跟踪。     

A parametric imaging approach for the segmentation of ultrasound data

When an ultrasonic examination is performed, a segmentation tool would often be very useful, either for the detection of pathologies, the early diagnosis of cancer or the follow-up of the lesions. Such a tool must be both reliable and accurate. However, because of the relatively reduced quality of ultrasound images due to the speckled texture, the segmentation of ultrasound data is a difficult task. We have previously proposed to tackle the problem using a multiresolution Bayesian region-based algorithm. For computation time purposes, a multiresolution version has been implemented. In order to improve the quality of the segmentation, we propose to perform the segmentation not only from the envelope image but to combine more information about the properties of the tissues in the segmentation process. Several acoustical parameters have thus been computed, either directly from the images or from the radio-frequency (RF) signal.

In a previous study, two parametric images were involved in the segmentation process. The parameter represented the integrated backscatter (IBS) and the mean central frequency (MCF), which is a measurement related to the attenuation of ultrasound waves in the media. In this study, parameters representative of the scattering conditions in the tissue are evaluated in the multiparametric segmentation process. They are extracted from the K-distribution (,b) and the Nakagami distribution (m,Ω) and are related to the local density of scatterers (,m), the size of the scatterers (b) and the backscattering properties of the medium (Ω).

The acoustical features are calculated locally on a sliding window. This procedure allows to built parametric mapping representing the particular characteristics of the medium. To test the influence of the acoustical parameters in the segmentation process, a set of numerical phantoms has been computed using the Field software developed by J.A. Jensen. Each phantom consists in two regions with two different acoustical properties: the density of scatterers and the scattering amplitude. From both the simulated RF signals and envelope images, the parameters have been computed; their relevance to represent a particular characteristic of the medium is evaluated. The segmentation has been processed for each phantom. The ability of each parameter to improve the segmentation results is validated. A agar–gel phantom has also been created, in order to test the accuracy of the parameters in conditions closer to the in vivo ultrasound imaging. This phantom contains four inclusions with different concentrations of silica. A B&K ultrasound device provides the RF data. The quantification of the segmentation quality is based on the rate of correctly classified pixels and it has been computed for all the parameters either from the field images or the phantom images. The large improvement in the segmentation results obtained reveals that the multiparametric segmentation scheme proposed in this study can be a reliable tool for the processing of noisy ultrasound data.     

水浸超声检测的平面波频域快速成像算法

给出了一种基于一步相移法的水浸超声检测快速频域算法,以适用于液浸式相控阵成像。通过在阵列信号频域乘以相移因子,将阵列虚拟延拓至水浸工件表面,再进行单介质频域成像。相比时域延时叠加算法,节省了计算界面折射点的用时。对于垂直入射平面波检测,提出一种网格匹配的方法,通过调整傅里叶变换的点数,使阵列信号频域和图像频域的采样网格相重合,有效地减少了频域插值误差和伪像,进一步降低了运算次数.实验结果表明,网格匹配频域算法的运算次数仅为时域平面波算法的1/60,为水浸式超声实时检测提供了一种可行方案。     

An alternative method for using bipolar junction transistors as a radiation dosimetry detector in breast cancer treatment

Silicon photodetectors and MOSFETs (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors) are frequently used devices for measuring ionizing radiation in health physics instrumentation. The Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT) is not a typical device used as a detector for measuring some physical quantities in radiotherapy beams due to its loss of sensitivity to ionizing radiation, as a consequence of radiation damage in the silicon semiconductor substrate. Actually, the know-how of the BJT characteristic curves and its response to ionizing radiation leads us to suggest an alternative method to estimate the radiation dose value in breast cancer treatments. The BJT parameter to be evaluated before and after the irradiation procedure is the BJT amplification factor, also called DC gain β. In this work, the study was done using a BJT known as Darlington type, within an Alderson Rando anthropomorphic phantom. Darlington transistors have very high gain and this feature allowed that the BJT gain changes to be correlated with the dose of the radiation beam. The results indicate that this new method could be an alternative option to estimate the dose value in the phantom for measurements in breast cancer radiotherapy.     

Space-time encoding for high frame rate ultrasound imaging

Frame rate in ultrasound imaging can be dramatically increased by using sparse synthetic transmit aperture (STA) beamforming techniques. The two main drawbacks of the method are the low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the motion artifacts, that degrade the image quality. In this paper we propose a spatio-temporal encoding for STA imaging based on simultaneous transmission of two quasi-orthogonal tapered linear FM signals. The excitation signals are an up- and a down-chirp with frequency division and a cross-talk of -55 dB. The received signals are first cross-correlated with the appropriate code, then spatially decoded and finally beamformed for each code, yielding two images per emission. The spatial encoding is a Hadamard encoding previously suggested by Chiao et al. [in: Proceedings of the IEEE Ultrasonics Symposium, 1997, p. 1679]. The Hadamard matrix has half the size of the transmit element groups, due to the orthogonality of the temporal encoded wavefronts. Thus, with this method, the frame rate is doubled compared to previous systems. Another advantage is the utilization of temporal codes which are more robust to attenuation. With the proposed technique it is possible to obtain images dynamically focused in both transmit and receive with only two firings. This reduces the problem of motion artifacts. The method has been tested with extensive simulations using Field II. Resolution and SNR are compared with uncoded STA imaging and conventional phased-array imaging. The range resolution remains the same for coded STA imaging with four emissions and is slightly degraded for STA imaging with two emissions due to the -55 dB cross-talk between the signals. The additional proposed temporal encoding adds more than 15 dB on the SNR gain, yielding a SNR at the same order as in phased-array imaging.     

高功率微波作用下限幅器尖峰泄漏特性

针对限幅器在高功率微波（HPM）作用下的尖峰泄漏问题,基于搭建的HPM注入实验平台和电路仿真开展了研究。研究结果表明：当注入功率超过6 dBm时,限幅器会出现尖峰泄漏现象,限幅器泄漏尖峰的上升沿与脉宽随着注入功率的增加而减小,而绝对尖峰泄漏功率随注入功率的增加呈增长趋势,平顶泄漏功率呈近似“线性增加-缓慢下降-小幅增长”趋势。并且,实验结果显示：HPM脉宽与重频对限幅器尖峰泄漏特性基本无影响,其泄漏特性变化规律与单次脉冲的基本一致;尖峰泄漏能量随注入功率的增加而降低。     

Lesion edge preserved direct average strain estimation for ultrasound elasticity imaging

Elasticity imaging techniques with built-in or regularization-based smoothing feature for ensuring strain continuity are not intelligent enough to prevent distortion or lesion edge blurring while smoothing. This paper proposes a novel approach with built-in lesion edge preservation technique for high quality direct average strain imaging. An edge detection scheme, typically used in diffusion filtering is modified here for lesion edge detection. Based on the extracted edge information, lesion edges are preserved by modifying the strain determining cost function in the direct-average-strain-estimation (DASE) method. The proposed algorithm demonstrates approximately 3.42–4.25 dB improvement in terms of edge-mean-square-error (EMSE) than the other reported regularized or average strain estimation techniques in finite-element-modeling (FEM) simulation with almost no sacrifice in elastographic-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNRe) and elastographic-contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNRe) metrics. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is also tested for the experimental phantom data and in vivo breast data. The results reveal that the proposed method can generate a high quality strain image delineating the lesion edge more clearly than the other reported strain estimation techniques that have been designed to ensure strain continuity. The computational cost, however, is little higher for the proposed method than the simpler DASE and considerably higher than that of the 2D analytic minimization (AM2D) method.     

超声测距变结构控制系统的研究

本文在超声测距系统中采用了变结构控制理论，根据所测物体的反射界面和介质性质，自动调节超声波发射换能器的功率，建立了超声测距系统的数学模型，对系统方程进行了理论分析，研究了变结构控制系统的设计方法，并结合应用实例，对钻井法凿井用超声波测井仪中超声测距系统进行了计算机仿真，并在实验室进行了实验。     

Effect of high intensity ultrasound on the fermentation profile of Lactobacillus sakei in a meat model system

The objective of this study was to investigate the efficacy of high intensity ultrasound on the fermentation profile of Lactobacillus sakei in a meat model system. Ultrasound power level (0–68.5 W) and sonication time (0–9 min) at 20 °C were assessed against the growth of L. sakei using a Microplate reader over a period of 24 h. The L. sakei growth data showed a good fit with the Gompertz model (R² > 0.90; SE < 0.042). Second order polynomial models demonstrated the effect of ultrasonic power and sonication time on the specific growth rate (SGR, μ, h⁻¹) and lag phase (λ, h). A higher SGR and a shorter lag phase were observed at low power (2.99 W for 5 min) compared to control. Conversely, a decrease (p < 0.05) in SGR with an increase in lag phase was observed with an increase in ultrasonic power level. Cell-free extracts obtained after 24 h fermentation of ultrasound treated samples showed antimicrobial activity against Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes, Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium at lower concentrations compared to control. No significant difference (p < 0.05) among treatments was observed for lactic acid content after a 24 h fermentation period. This study showed that both stimulation and retardation of L. sakei is possible, depending on the ultrasonic power and sonication time employed. Hence, fermentation process involving probiotics to develop functional food products can be tailored by selection of ultrasound processing parameters.