A novel approach to the aperture windowing in medical imaging

A new technique is proposed to improve the lateral resolution in the conven tional B-mode imaging systems, which enables a simple array aperture window ing in the transmitting mode. Amplitude shaping is performed without modify ing the transmitting voltage of the array elements, but only varying the ex citation pulse length from one element to another. This method presents som e attractive practical advantages, and the reduction of the sidelobe energy is comparable to that attainable with a conventional aperture windowing. P arametric plots are given, which transform an amplitude apodization into a 'time apodization' for any type of transducer array. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scie nce B.V. All rights reserved.