Investigations of Ultrasound Propagation and Image Processing

超声广泛用于医学诊断和治疗以及许多工业应用。它对医学诊断的重要性在于它的非侵入性，以及它使用比笔记本电脑大不了多少的系统以相对经济的方式提供图像和定量信息的能力。诊断系统利用传感器发射超声波并收集反射信号，从而创建结构图像或血流图像。它们有许多局限性，在信号和图像处理方面的新思想和改进的帮助下，它们的性能应该会进一步提高。在这个拨款申请中提出了几个子主题，其中一些解决了当前的局限性，一些考虑了与诊断应用直接相关的问题。在接下来的内容中，只详细介绍了其中的两个主题。

Ultrasound is widely used both for medical diagnostic and therapeutics as well as for many industrial applications. Its importance for medical diagnosis arises from its non-invasive nature and its ability to provide images and quantitative information in a relatively economical manner using systems that are not much larger than a lap-top computer. Diagnostic systems make use of transducers that emit the ultrasound and gather the reflected signal so as to create structural images or to image blood flow. They have a number of limitations which, with the help of new ideas and improvements in signal and image processing, should enable their performance to be further enhanced. In this grant application several sub-topics are proposed, some of which address current limitations and some consider issues directly related to diagnostic applications. In what follows below, just two of the topics are detailed.