Simultaneous Multiple Transmit Focusing Using Orthogonal Weighted Linear FM Chirp

가중된 직교 선형 FM신호를 이용한 송신 동시 다중 빔집속 기반의 초음파 영상 기법

A new method for simultaneous multiple transmit focusing using orthogonal weighted FM chirp is proposed. Weighted chirp signals focused at different depths are transmitted at the same time. These chirp signals are mutually orthogonal in the approximate sense that the autocorrelation function of each signal has a narrow mainlobe width and low sidelobe levels, and the crosscorrellation function of any pair of the signals has smaller values than the sidelobe levels of each autocorrelation function. This means that each weighted chirp signal can be separately compressed into a short pulse, focused individually and combined with other focused beams to form a frame of image. Theoretically, any two chirp signals defined in two nonoverlapped frequency bands are mutually orthogonal. In the present work, however, a fractional overlap of adjacent frequency bands, by up to 25%, were permitted to design more chirp signals within a given transducer bandwidth. The crosscorrelation values due to the frequency overlap could be reduced by alternating the direction of frequency sweep of the adjacent chirp signals. The simulation results show that this method can improve the lateral resolution of image without sacrifice in the frame rate compared with the conventional pulse system.