Estimation of pulses in ultrasound B-scan images

It is shown, based on an expression for the received pressure field in pulsed medical ultrasound systems, that a common one-dimensional pulse can be estimated from individual A-lines. An autoregressive moving average (ARMA) model is suggested for the pulse, and an estimator based on the prediction error method is derived. The estimator is used on a segment of an A-line, assuming that the pulse does not change significantly inside the segment. Several examples of the use of the estimator on synthetic data measured from a tissue phantom and in vitro data measured from a calf's liver are given. They show that a pulse can be estimated even at moderate signal-to-noise ratios.