A Study of Testing Method for Diagnostic Ultrasonic Array Probe through Pattern Analysis of Acoustic-Fields with Probe Channel Division

The acoustic field analysis method is the superior calibration method for rectifying the ultrasonic probe sensitivity. This method also can be applied to evaluate the probe performance in clinical fields without numerical analysis and precise measurements. In this paper, we propose the method of acoustic field pattern analysis with probe channel division for the evaluation of diagnostic ultrasound probe characterization. In order to verify our purpose, we performed a set of experiments. We measured the acoustic-field pattern of the three inferiority probes by channel division to evaluate an acoustic field distribution and impulse response characteristics. By comparing the results of acoustic field measurement method with that of conventional method such as impulse response and live image test for linear array probes, it is demonstrated that the ultrasound field measurement method is more effective then conventional method in detection of defective elements.