Combined Pulse Compression and Adaptive Beamforming in Coded Excitation Ultrasound Medical Imaging

Coded excitation has been studied and applied to medical ultrasound for several years. The advantages of using coded excitation compared to the conventional pulses are improved SNR, minimized exposure of patients to potential biological effects, and the ability of using even higher ultrasonic frequencies. However, the major problem associated with coded excitation is the high side-lobe level which introduces the side-lobe artifacts. In this paper, we have utilized the adaptive beamforming to suppress the side-lobe effects and thus enhance the resolution in a coded excitation ultrasound imaging system. Simulation results showed that by applying minimum variance adaptive beamformer to a chirp-excited ultrasound imaging system, significant improvement in both SNR and resolution can be achieved.