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The transverse oscillation (TO) technique can improve the estimation of tissue motion perpendicular to the ultrasound beam direction. TOs can be introduced using plane wave (PW) insonification and bilobed Gaussian apodization (BA) on receive (abbreviated as PWTO). Furthermore, the TO frequency of PWTO can be doubled after a heterodyning demodulation process is performed (abbreviated as PWTO*). This paper is concerned with identifying the limitations of the PWTO technique in the specific context of myocardial deformation imaging with phased arrays and investigating the conditions in which it remains advantageous over traditional focused (FOC) beamforming. For this purpose, several tissue phantoms were simulated using Field II, undergoing a wide range of displacement magnitudes and modes (lateral, axial, and rotational motions). The Cramer-Rao lower bound was used to optimize TO beamforming parameters and theoretically predict the fundamental tracking performance limits associated with the FOC, PWTO, and PWTO* beamforming scenarios. This framework was extended to also predict the performance for BA functions that are windowed by the physical aperture of the transducer, leading to higher lateral oscillations. It was found that windowed BA functions resulted in lower jitter errors compared with traditional BA functions. PWTO* outperformed FOC at all investigated signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) levels but only up to a certain displacement, with the advantage rapidly decreasing when the SNR increased. These results suggest that PWTO* improves lateral tracking performance, but only when interframe displacements remain relatively low. This paper concludes by translating these findings into a clinical environment by suggesting optimal scanner settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The superposition of experimental and analytical data is useful for simulating ultrasonic images of defects in samples containing high levels of coherent structural noise. This technique assumes that the superposition of the response of a defect in a homogeneous medium with that of a heterogeneous, defect-free medium is identical to the response of the same defect embedded in the heterogeneous medium. This implies a single-scattering process. Previous experimental work demonstrated successful use of the technique but only over a limited range of defect signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). However, there was a concern that it might not remain valid at low SNR due to, for example, multiple-scattering effects. This paper shows that this technique provides accurate results over the full range of SNRs of defects where the defect is discernible from image noise. The technique is, therefore, suitable for simulating any inspection where ultrasonic imaging is an appropriate method of nondestructive evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ever increasing demands for mobile network access have resulted in a significant increase in bandwidth usage. By improving the system spectral efficiency, multi-way relay networks (MWRNs) provide promising approaches to address this challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel linear beamforming design, namely partial zero-forcing (PZF), for MWRNs with a multiple-input-multiple-output relay. Compared to zero-forcing (ZF), PZF relaxes the constraints on the relay beamforming matrix such that only partial user-interference, instead of all, is canceled at the relay. The users eliminate the remaining interferences through self-interference and successive interference cancellation. A sum-rate maximization problem is formulated and solved to exploit the extra degrees-of-freedom resulted from PZF. Simulation results show that the proposed PZF relay beamforming design achieves significantly higher network sum-rates than the existing linear beamforming designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the secure relay beamforming problem for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in an amplify-and-forward (AF) two-way relay network. We consider scenarios that the eavesdropper's channel state information (CSI) is and is not available. When the eavesdropper's CSI is available, our objective is to maximize the achievable secrecy sum rate under transmit power constraint and energy harvesting constraint. Since the optimization problem is nonconvex, we derive its performance upper bound, which requires 2-D search, where a semidefinite programming is solved in each step. We also propose an upper bound-based rank-one solution by employing the Gaussian randomization method. To reduce computational complexity, we transform the optimization problem into a difference-of-convex programming and propose a sequential parametric convex approximation (SPCA)-based iterative algorithm to find a locally optimal solution. Furthermore, we also propose a zero-forcing (ZF)-based suboptimal solution. Simulation results demonstrate that the upper bound-based rank-one solution archives the performance almost the same as the upper bound that has high computational complexity. The low-complexity SPCA-based locally optimal solution performs close to the upper bound. The ZF-based suboptimal solution has the lowest computational complexity among the proposed solutions. When the eavesdropper's CSI is not available, we propose an artificial noise-aided secure relay beamforming scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]