Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul 04107, Korea.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Dec 27;20(1):173. doi: 10.3390/s20010173.
In three-dimensional (3D) medical ultrasound imaging with two-dimensional (2D) arrays, sparse 2D arrays have been studied to reduce the number of active channels. Among them, sparse 2D arrays with regular or uniform arrangements of elements have advantages of low side lobe energy and uniform field responses over the entire field of view. This paper presents two uniform sparse array models: sparse rectangular arrays (SRAs) on a rectangular grid and sparse spiral arrays (SSAs) on a sunflower grid. Both arrays can be easily implemented on the commercially available or the custom-made arrays. To suppress the overall grating lobe levels, the transmit (Tx) and receive (Rx) array pairs of both the array models are designed not to have grating lobes at the same locations in the Tx/Rx beam patterns, for which the theoretical design rules are also proposed. Computer simulation results indicate that the proposed array pairs for both the SRAs and the SSAs achieve peak grating lobe levels below -40 dB using about a quarter of the number of elements in the dense rectangular array while maintaining similar beam widths to that of the dense array pair.
在二维(2D)阵列的三维(3D)医学超声成象中,已经研究了稀疏 2D 阵列以减少活动通道的数量。其中,具有规则或均匀元件排列的稀疏 2D 阵列在整个视场中具有低旁瓣能量和均匀场响应的优点。本文提出了两种均匀稀疏阵列模型:矩形网格上的稀疏矩形阵列(SRA)和向日葵网格上的稀疏螺旋阵列(SSA)。这两种阵列都可以很容易地在市售或定制的阵列上实现。为了抑制整体栅瓣电平,设计了这两种阵列模型的发射(Tx)和接收(Rx)阵列对,以使 Tx/Rx 波束图案中的同一位置没有栅瓣,为此还提出了理论设计规则。计算机模拟结果表明,所提出的 SRA 和 SSA 的阵列对使用密集矩形阵列的四分之一数量的元件实现了低于-40dB 的峰值栅瓣电平,同时保持与密集阵列对相似的波束宽度。