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The objective of this paper is an experimental study of the most crucial parameters of the received acoustic signals (e.g. signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), side-lobes level (SLL), axial resolution) obtained as a result of simultaneous emission of mutually orthogonal Golay complementary sequences (MOGCS) to demonstrate their feasibility of being used in ultrasound diagnostics. Application of the MOGCS in ultrasound measurements allows the image reconstruction time to be shortened without decreasing the resulting quality of reconstructed images in comparison with regular complementary Golay coded sequences (CGCS). In this paper two sets of 16-bits long MOGCS were implemented in the Verasonics Vantage™ (Verasonics Inc., Kirkland, WA, USA) scanner. Ultrasound data were generated using a perfect reflector, a custom-made nylon wire phantom and tissue mimicking phantom. Parameters of the detected MOGCS echoes like SNR, SLL and axial resolution were determined and compared to that of the standard CGCS and the short two-sine cycles pulse. It was evidenced that applying MOGCS did not compromise the parameters of the separated and compressed echoes in comparison to the other types of transmitted signal - the CGCS and the short pulse. Concretely, both the MOGCS and CGCS yield similar SNR increase in comparison to the short pulse. Almost similar values of the axial resolution estimated at the full width at the half maximum level for all types of the transmitted signals were also obtained. At the same time, using the MOGCS the data acquisition speed can be increased twice in comparison with the CGCS signal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents an overview of theoretical aspects of ultrasound image reconstruction techniques based on the circular Radon transform inversion. Their potential application in ultrasonography in a similar way as it was successfully done in the x-ray computer tomography is demonstrated. The methods employing Radon transform were previously extensively explored in the synthetic aperture radars, geophysics, and medical imaging using x-ray computer tomography. In this paper the main attention is paid to the ultrasound imaging employing monostatic transmit-receive configuration. Specifically, a single transmit and receive omnidirectional source placed at the same spatial location is used for generation of a wide-band ultrasound pulse and detection of back-scattered waves. The paper presents derivation of the closed-form solution of the CRT inversion algorithms by two different approaches: the range-migration algorithm (RMA) and the deconvolution algorithm (DA). Experimentally determined data of ultrasound phantom obtained using a 32-element 5 MHz linear transducer array with 0.48 mm element pitch and 0.36 mm element width and 5 mm height, excited by a 2 sine cycles burst pulse are used for comparison of images reconstructed by the RMA, DA, and conventional synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT). It is demonstrated that both the RMA and SAFT allow better lateral resolution and visualization depth to be achieved as compared to the DA approach. Comparison of the results obtained by the RMA method and the SAFT indicates slight improvement of the lateral resolution for the SAFT of approximately 1.5 and 1.6% at the depth of 12 and 32 mm, respectively. Concurrently, however, the visualization depth increase for the RMA is shown in comparison with the SAFT. Specifically, the scattered echo amplitude increase by the factor of 1.36 and 1.12 at the depth of 22 and 32 mm is demonstrated. It is also shown that the RMA runs about 30% faster than the SAFT and about 12% faster than the DA method [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]