Acoustic Field Measurement for Performance Evaluation and Characterization of Medical Ultrasonic Probe by Channel Division

Abstract

In spite of developed techniques in ultrasonic medical imaging, it is important to systematize each component in order to get the proper performances. One of the most important tasks in ultrasound medical imaging system is to design a proper probe that can estimate defects of elements having influence on the probe performance. In this paper, we propose an improved acoustic measurement method for the evaluation and characterization of medical ultrasonic probes with the hydrophone. The experimental results show that the suggested method is efficient to get and analyze data from the three ultrasonic linear array probes. We also present the compared results of experimental characterization of suggested acoustic field measurement and conventional measurement on three array probes. Each probe has 128 elements and one test channel is composed of 8 elements. In experiment, we randomly selected a channel in the probe arrays to evaluate the characterization of suggested method. We also show that the suggested method can properly estimate the deterioration of medical ultrasonic probes and we demonstrate the suggested method is more proper to evaluate the performance and characterization of ultrasonic array probes then the conventional technique.