A study of second harmonic generation by focused medical transducer pulses

Second harmonic imaging systems transmit relatively low frequency pulses, e.g., 2.5 MHz, and image the frequency-doubled second harmonic generated by acoustic nonlinearity. Imaging the second rather than the first harmonic eliminates significant wavefront aberration and attenuation on the forward path, narrows the beam, and suppresses sidelobes. This technique is used successfully in commercial medical imaging systems and may become dominant in the near future. However, system optimization requires a better understanding of second harmonic generation by focused ultrasound pulses in tissue. Data and simulations are presented quantifying aberration and second harmonic generation by two-dimensional ultrasound beams in realistic tissue models. A pseudo-spectral solver is used to achieve very high accuracy over long paths through lossy, nonlinear abdominal wall and liver.