Deconvolution problem to produce ultrasonic short pulses

The quality of a medical image is highly dependent on the axial resolution of the ultrasonic transducer, i.e. the duration of the transmitted and received ultrasonic pulses. The emission of short ultrasonic pulses can be accomplished by precompensating the electrical excitation applied to the transducer. To achieve this the impulse response of the transducer has to be determined beforehand. The paper presents a different approach to determine the impulse response of the transducer by using common deconvolution techniques. The main advantages of this approach are that it is easily programmable and that it avoids user interpretation, which is inherent in such deconvolution techniques. To prove the effectiveness of the method, the impulse response obtained is used to modify the electrical excitation applied to a piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer to produce a short emitted/received signal. Experimental results show that a transducer having more than one resonance peak may be compensated resulting in an increase of axial resolution.