Barker-sequence-modulated golay coded excitation technique for ultrasound imaging

Abstract

In medical ultrasound imaging, Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is an important factor for imaging quality. Coded excitation methods have been widely used such as Golay codes and Barker codes to achieve higher SNR without degradation of axial resolution. The improvement of SNR is determined by code length. However, because conventional Golay codes and Barker codes are limited to specific known sequences, it is only allowed to select one of the known sequences for ultrasound imaging. In this paper, we propose a new Barker-sequence-modulated Golay (BMG) coded excitation technique for ultrasound imaging. The sequences of proposed BMG technique are generated by modulating Golay code with Barker code, which can lead to additional improvement in signal intensity and flexibility for code length compared with conventional Golay code. From the phantom study, the intensity of BMG technique is 28.9dB higher than 1C-pulse. We demonstrate that BMG technique has a higher contrast than the others. To perform a quantitative evaluation, contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR) values were computed from the cyst images. The 6C-BMG method are improved in terms of the CNR value of 4.19.