Frequency- and depth-dependent compensation of ultrasonic signals

The resolution in ultrasonic images decreases with depth when using traditional time-gain compensation (TGC) of the received signal. To reduce this effect, both frequency-dependent and depth-dependent compensation is introduced. A time-varying digital filtering method is presented for this purpose, which is based on Wiener filtering. Images obtained from a simulated tissue equivalent are presented and the frequency-compensated images are compared to conventional TGC-compensated images. It is shown that the improvement in resolution using frequency-dependent compensation is considerable when the signal-to-noise ratio in the received signal is high.