PMID- 22083765
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20120328
LR  - 20111115
IS  - 1525-8955 (Electronic)
IS  - 0885-3010 (Linking)
VI  - 58
IP  - 11
DP  - 2011 Nov
TI  - Dual-pulse frequency compounded superharmonic imaging.
PG  - 2316-24
LID - 10.1109/TUFFC.2011.2089 [doi]
AB  - Tissue second-harmonic imaging is currently the default mode in commercial 
      diagnostic ultrasound systems. A new modality, superharmonic imaging (SHI), 
      combines the third through fifth harmonics originating from nonlinear wave 
      propagation through tissue. SHI could further improve the resolution and quality 
      of echographic images. The superharmonics have gaps between the harmonics because 
      the transducer has a limited bandwidth of about 70% to 80%. This causes ghost 
      reflection artifacts in the superharmonic echo image. In this work, a new 
      dual-pulse frequency compounding (DPFC) method to eliminate these artifacts is 
      introduced. In the DPFC SHI method, each trace is constructed by summing two 
      firings with slightly different center frequencies. The feasibility of the method 
      was established using a single-element transducer. Its acoustic field was modeled 
      in KZK simulations and compared with the corresponding measurements obtained with 
      a hydrophone apparatus. Subsequently, the method was implemented on and optimized 
      for a setup consisting of an interleaved phased-array transducer (44 elements at 
      1 MHz and 44 elements at 3.7 MHz, optimized for echocardiography) and a 
      programmable ultrasound system. DPFC SHI effectively suppresses the ghost 
      reflection artifacts associated with imaging using multiple harmonics. Moreover, 
      compared with the single-pulse third harmonic, DPFC SHI improved the axial 
      resolution by 3.1 and 1.6 times at the -6-dB and -20-dB levels, respectively. 
      Hence, DPFC offers the possibility of generating harmonic images of a higher 
      quality at a cost of a moderate frame rate reduction.
FAU - van Neer, Paul L M J
AU  - van Neer PL
AD  - Department of Biomedical Engineering, Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, The 
      Netherlands.
FAU - Danilouchkine, Mikhail G
AU  - Danilouchkine MG
FAU - Matte, Guillaume M
AU  - Matte GM
FAU - van der Steen, Anton F W
AU  - van der Steen AF
FAU - de Jong, Nico
AU  - de Jong N
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
PL  - United States
TA  - IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control
JT  - IEEE transactions on ultrasonics, ferroelectrics, and frequency control
JID - 9882735
SB  - IM
MH  - *Algorithms
MH  - Elasticity Imaging Techniques/instrumentation/*methods
MH  - Image Enhancement/*methods
MH  - Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted/*methods
MH  - Phantoms, Imaging
MH  - Reproducibility of Results
MH  - Sensitivity and Specificity
MH  - *Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted
EDAT- 2011/11/16 06:00
MHDA- 2012/03/29 06:00
CRDT- 2011/11/16 06:00
PHST- 2011/11/16 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2011/11/16 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2012/03/29 06:00 [medline]
AID - 10.1109/TUFFC.2011.2089 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2011 Nov;58(11):2316-24. doi: 
      10.1109/TUFFC.2011.2089.