Combined chirp coded tissue harmonic and fundamental ultrasound imaging for intravascular ultrasound: 20-60 MHz phantom and ex vivo results.

The application of chirp coded excitation to pulse inversion tissue harmonic imaging can increase signal to noise ratio. On the other hand, the elevation of range side lobe level, caused by leakages of the fundamental signal, has been problematic in mechanical scanners which are still the most prevalent in high frequency intravascular ultrasound imaging. Fundamental chirp coded excitation imaging can achieve range side lobe levels lower than -60dB with Hanning window, but it yields higher side lobes level than pulse inversion chirp coded tissue harmonic imaging (PI-CTHI). Therefore, in this paper a combined pulse inversion chirp coded tissue harmonic and fundamental imaging mode (CPI-CTHI) is proposed to retain the advantages of both chirp coded harmonic and fundamental imaging modes by demonstrating 20-60MHz phantom and ex vivo results. A simulation study shows that the range side lobe level of CPI-CTHI is 16dB lower than PI-CTHI, assuming that the transducer translates incident positions by 50μm when two beamlines of pulse inversion pair are acquired. CPI-CTHI is implemented for a proto-typed intravascular ultrasound scanner capable of combined data acquisition in real-time. A wire phantom study shows that CPI-CTHI has a 12dB lower range side lobe level and a 7dB higher echo signal to noise ratio than PI-CTHI, while the lateral resolution and side lobe level are 50μm finer and -3dB less than fundamental chirp coded excitation imaging respectively. Ex vivo scanning of a rabbit trachea demonstrates that CPI-CTHI is capable of visualizing blood vessels as small as 200μm in diameter with 6dB better tissue contrast than either PI-CTHI or fundamental chirp coded excitation imaging. These results clearly indicate that CPI-CTHI may enhance tissue contrast with less range side lobe level than PI-CTHI.