Estimation of in-vivo pulses in medical ultrasound

An algorithm for the estimation of one-dimensional in-vivo ultrasound pulses is derived. The routine estimates a set of ARMA parameters describing the pulse and uses data from a number of adjacent rf lines. Using multiple lines results in a decrease in variance on the estimated parameters and significantly reduces the risk of terminating the algorithm at a local minimum. Examples from use on synthetic data confirms the reduction in variance and increased chance of successful minimization termination. Simulations are also reported indicating the relation between the one-dimensional pulse and the three-dimensional, attenuated ultrasound field for a concave transducer. Pulses are estimated from in-vivo liver data showing good resemblance to a pulse measured as the response from a planar reflector and then properly attenuated. The main application for the algorithm is to function as a preprocessing stage for deconvolution algorithms using parametric pulses.