Synthetic aperture echo imaging using a single element ultrasonic transducer

This paper presents a system model and its corresponding reconstruction method for synthetic aperture echo imaging using a single element ultrasonic transducer (SEUT). The system model incorporates the spherical nature of the SEUT's radiation pattern. The reconstruction method integrates the recorded signals at various coordinates of a translational or rotational SEUT via a spatial Fourier transform. It is shown that the transformed data provides samples of the spatial Fourier transform of the test object's reflectivity function. This study indicates that a synthesized array and its physical counterpart possess the same resolution despite the fact that the synthesized array's signal subspace is a subset of the much larger signal subspace for the physical array.