High order pulse-echo (HOPE) ultrasound

TL;DR

HOPE ultrasound innovatively utilizes high order reflections to surpass traditional resolution limits, enhance contrast, and improve measurement accuracy without extra hardware, benefiting various biomedical and industrial applications.

Contribution

Introduction of HOPE-ultrasound, a method that exploits high order reflections to significantly improve resolution, contrast, and measurement accuracy in ultrasound imaging.

Findings

Resolved sub-micrometer features beyond Nyquist limit

Revealed defects invisible to conventional methods

Enhanced accuracy of tissue attenuation measurements

Abstract

Multiple reflections between transducer and imaged object can naturally occur in ultrasound imaging and other acoustic sensing applications such as sonar. The repeated interaction of the emitted wavefront with the imaged object is traditionally regarded an undesired reverberation artifact, often misinterpreted as fictitious acoustic boundaries. Here we introduce high order reflection pulse-echo (HOPE)-ultrasound, a novel method that leverages high order reflections to improve on several aspects of conventional ultrasound imaging. HOPE is experimentally demonstrated to resolve sub-micrometer features by breaking through the Nyquist resolution limit. The major contrast enhancement of the high reflection orders allowed to reveal defects within materials invisible to conventional scanning acoustic microscopy. The technique is further shown to improve accuracy of frequency-dependent ultrasound attenuation measurements from biological tissues. HOPE ultrasound requires no additional hardware and is easy to implement, underscoring its potential to boost imaging performance in a broad range of biomedical imaging, nondestructive testing, and other acoustic sensing applications.