In Vitro Volume Imaging of Articular Cartilage Using Chirp-Coded High Frequency Ultrasound

Coded waveforms are frequently used as excitation pulses in ultrasonic systems e.g. to reduce noise and increase the penetration depth. The current work focuses on ultrasonic imaging of thick articular cartilage samples using a customized ultrasonic microscope scanning system. Long chirp-coded waveforms were employed on this system and investigated on the cartilage samples using both a matched-and Wiener-filter for wave compression. A short excitation pulse typically used in most commercial acoustic scanning microscope systems was also tested, and compared to the coded/compressed ones in terms of C-and B-scan images.