An Improved Chirp Coded Excitation Based on Compression Pulse Weighting Method in Endoscopic Ultrasound Imaging

Chirp coded excitation is an effective method to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and penetration depth of high-frequency endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) imaging. In coded excitation, pulse compression is applied to compress the elongated coded signals into a short pulse, which determines the final imaging performance, including spatial resolution and SNR. However, with the current pulse compression methods, it is hard to get high performance in the peak sidelobe level (PSL), image contrast, and axial resolution at the same time. To solve this problem, in this article, a new method named compressed pulse weighting method (CPWM) was proposed based on the combination of two kinds of pulse compression signals. A brief theoretical derivation proved the feasibility of method. The proposed method was evaluated by the simulation and phantom experiments. Compared with traditional method, the results showed that the proposed adaptive weighting method can provide increases of 32.42% in the penetration depth, 9.48 dB in the SNR, 5.60 dB in the contrast ratio (CR), 5.46 in the contrast-to-noise ratio (CNR), and 0.13 mm in the axial imaging resolution for 12-MHz EUS. Therefore, this method can effectively improve the ultrasound penetration depth and imaging quality, which made it have good potential for high-frequency ultrasound imaging.