Harmonic Golay coded excitation based on harmonic quadrature demodulation method

Harmonic coded excitation techniques have been used to increase SNR of harmonic imaging with limited peak voltage. Harmonic Golay coded excitation, in particular, generates each scan line using four transmit-receive cycles, unlike conventional Golay coded excitation method, thus resulting in low frame rates. In this paper we propose a method of increasing the frame rate of said method without impacting the image quality. The proposed method performs two transmit-receive cycles using QPSK code to ensure that the harmonic components of incoming signals are Golay coded and uses harmonic quadrature demodulation to extract compressed second harmonic component only. The proposed method has been validated through mathematical analysis and MATLAB simulation, and has been verified to yield a limited error of −52.08dB compared to the ideal case. Therefore, the proposed method doubles the frame rate compared to the existing harmonic Golay coded excitation method without significantly deteriorating the image quality.