P1A-9 Transducer Bandwidth Influence on the Golay Encoded Ultrasound Echoes

This paper investigates the effect of ultrasound imaging transducer´s fractional bandwidth on the gain of the compressed echo signal for different spectral widths of the complementary Golay sequences (CGS). Two different bit lengths were investigated, specifically one and two cycles. Three transducers having fractional bandwidth of 25%, 58% and 80% and operating at frequencies 6 MHz, 4.4 MHz and 6 MHz, respectively were examined (one of the 6 MHz sources was made of composite material). The experimental results have shown that by increasing the code length, i.e. decreasing the bandwidth, the compressed echo amplitude could be enhanced. The smaller the bandwidth was the larger was the gain; the pulse-echo sensitivity of the echo amplitude increased by 1.88, 1.62 and 1.47, for 25%, 58% and 80% bandwidths, respectively. These results indicate that two cycles bit length excitation is more suitable for use with bandwidth limited commercially available imaging transducers. Further, the time resolution is retained for transducers with two cycles excitation providing the fractional bandwidth is lower than approximately 90%. The results of this work indicate that adjusting the code length allows signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) to be enhanced while using limited (less that 80%) bandwidth imaging transducers. Also, for such transducers two cycles excitation would not decrease the time resolution, obtained with ´conventional´ spike excitation. These results also indicate that CGS excitation could be successfully implemented with the existing, relatively narrow band imaging transducers without the need to use usually more expensive wideband, composite ones.