Simulation details
One of the guideline of the simulation was to generate synthetic phantoms with close properties as the ones from real acquisitions. To this end, the following points have been taking into account:
- the same probe settings as the ones used in experiments were simulated. The table bellow summarizes the main parameter values:
| Pitch | 0.30 mm |
| Element width | 0.27 mm |
| Element height | 5 mm |
| Elevation focus | 20 mm |
| Number of elements | 128 |
| Aperture | 38.4 mm |
| Transmit frequency | 5.208 MHz |
| Sampling frequency | 20.832 MHz |
| Pulse bandwidth | 67% |
| Excitation | 2.5 cycles |
- an elevation focus at 20 mm has been simulated;
- an attenuation coefficient of 0.5 dB / [MHz . cm] has been simulated in order to mimic the properties of the CIRS phantom used for experiments;
- a same time-gain-compensation (TGC) factor has been used for all the simulations. This TGC has been directly measured from experimental data acquired by the Verasonic system.
To be noted: because of the combined use of the elevation focus and an attenuation coefficient, a small delay of 0.2 mm along depth can be observed on the simulated phantom used to evaluate the performance on resolution and distorsion. Since this effect comes from the transmission scheme, it should not be compensated by the reconstructed algorithms.