| 摘要 |
<p>A medical ultrasonic diagnostic imaging method and apparatus uses a phased array transducer probe (12) to transmit a fundamental coded ultrasonic pulse into a tissue. This pulse has a time bandwidth product that is greater than 1 but less than 100. A receiver (18) is coupled to the probe to receive an Nth harmonic echo signal from the tissue, and a compression filter (22) compresses the harmonic echo signal with a compression function having a phase that varies about N times as fast as the fundamental coded ultrasonic pulse. In this way, the SNR of the resulting image is increased. The disclosed method and apparatus are particularly well adapted for use with tissue harmonic imaging, because of the typically low SNR characteristic of such imaging. Other aspects are well suited for imaging with nonlinear contrast agents.</p> |
