Abstract

Today’s medical ultrasound scanners continue to push the envelope with efforts to improve imaging performance. Increasingly this demands more sophisticated application of acoustics in the design of the beamformers for these scanners. In this paper, limitations of present designs are reviewed by the use of acoustic field simulations. These design limitations include spatial sampling of the transducer aperture and the contributions of two-dimensional apertures and the impact of variations in the speed of sound in the various tissues. The role of beamformation in defining the likely scatterer populations that will be included in any beam will be discussed. The introduction of harmonic imaging into medical ultrasound has changed the landscape significantly especially in fields such as echocardiography. This has generated the need to understand the harmonic generation process of the propagating acoustic wave. Comparisons of the acoustic beams due to the fundamental frequency spectrum and the harmonic spectra are discussed along with means by which the scanners take advantage of them. From this base one can begin to identify areas of further improvement and speculate on their likely impact on the diagnostic process.

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