Pulse Compression: From Radar to Real-Time Ultrasound Systems

Initially proposed for radar applications, pulse compression is a technique that enables the transmission of long coded pulses and matched filtering in reception in order to improve the range without sacrificing the resolution. Even if the effectiveness of pulse compression was demonstrated also for medical ultrasound systems, no details on the implementation of pulse compression methods in real-time imaging or Doppler systems using array probes have been presented for long time. In this work, the pulse compression technique was implemented in a low-cost research scanner and it is shown that it can be suitably used for both imaging and spectral Doppler investigations in real-time. An in vivo example is also presented, and it highlights that high SNR gain (up to 13 dB) can be obtained.