Biomedical subjects

M A G Izquierdo

Publications and source records attributed to M A G Izquierdo.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Time-varying prediction filter for structural noise reduction in ultrasonic NDE.

Predominant physical phenomenon in highly scattering materials is the attenuation due to dispersion. Therefore, received echo has high frequencies more severely attenuated than low frequencies and the structural noise can be modeled as a non-stationary random process. Most of the proposed techniques for enhancing the flaw visibility do not exploit the frequency dependency of the incoming flaw signal, assuming homogeneous behaviour of the insonified material. In this work, a new technique based on exploiting the non-stationary nature of the incoming UT signal is presented. Proposed technique is based on the prediction error obtained with a linear and time-varying parametric model of the noise. By this method, when the analyzed UT echo has only structural noise, the prediction error is low, however, if it contains a flaw, high prediction error occurs because a flaw is a non-predictable alteration of the material structure. Experiments with stainless steel show that this method has an excellent performance on SNR enhancement.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

Application of vernier thinning techniques to segmented annular arrays.

Due to the aperture periodicity, the inter-element spacing of two-dimensional squared arrays is maintained near lambda/2 in order to avoid grating lobes. This condition gives rise to severe problems derived from the huge number of array elements and from their little size that causes the signal to noise ratio to bring down. Vernier techniques have been proposed to lower the number of active elements, but the drastic reduction of the ultrasonic energy is still a great problem for the image contrast. In this work, vernier techniques for segmented annular (SA) arrays are theoretically studied. SA arrays produce lower grating lobes than squared arrays and, therefore, allow the element size to be increased beyond the lambda/2 constraint. Using larger elements, SA arrays have advantage to squared arrays because they have larger active area and smaller thinning order for the same complexity (number of channels) of the image system. Theoretical results of the vernier techniques applied to SA arrays in both radial and tangential directions are presented and compared with the equivalent squared array.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2004

Speckle reduction by energy time-frequency filtering.

Structural noise is a very important limitation to the visibility of flaw echoes in ultrasonic testing and evaluation of highly scattering materials. In order to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio, different algorithms have been developed. One of these techniques is based on filtering the spectrum low band of the received echo to obtain a significant improvement of the defect visibility. Based on this idea, in this work a new time-frequency technique is presented. In this method, block-processing autoregressive techniques are used to estimate the instantaneous center frequency of the traveling wave. From this information, a time-frequency filter is designed tuned at half the estimated instantaneous center frequency. Experimental results and the comparison with the non-time-frequency filtering technique are also included, showing that the proposed method has an excellent performance on SNR enhancement.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

3D beamforming with ultrasonic divided-ring arrays.

Conventional 2D arrays have a set of squared elements whose inter-element spacing is around lambda/2. This arrangement requires an excessive amount of electronic resources for the generation and processing of ultrasonic signals. In this work, the beam properties of a single divided-ring array are analysed theoretically with the goal of producing volumetric images. Divided-ring arrays are based on a circular pattern, which has a lower periodicity than square arrays, and this property allows increasing the element size while keeping the amplitude of the grating lobes at a reasonably low level. The paper emphasises several advantages of ring arrays, suggesting that these apertures are useful for 3D ultrasonic imaging. First, as the element size may increase, the number of elements can be reduced with little loss of emitting area. Second, ring arrays produce beams of large depth of field in both transmission and reception. This can be used to avoid the complexity associated with dynamic focusing.

Models, Theoretical↗

PubMed2002

Application of micromechanics to the characterization of mortar by ultrasound.

Mechanical properties of concrete and mortar structures can be estimated by ultrasonic non-destructive testing. When the ultrasonic velocity is known, there are standardized methods based on considering the concrete a homogeneous material. Cement composites, however, are heterogeneous and porous, and have a negative effect on the mechanical properties of structures. This work studies the impact of porosity on mechanical properties by considering concrete a multiphase material. A micromechanical model is applied in which the material is considered to consist of two phases: a solid matrix and pores. From this method, a set of expressions is obtained that relates the acoustic velocity and Young's modulus of mortar. Experimental work is based on non-destructive and destructive procedures over mortar samples whose porosity is varied. A comparison is drawn between micromechanical and standard methods, showing positive results for the method here proposed.

Journal Article↗

PubMed2002

Time-frequency Wiener filtering for structural noise reduction.

In order to enhance the defect in relation to background noise of large grained materials different algorithms have been developed. Wiener filtering techniques have proved to be efficient for the SNR enhancement of ultrasonic signals coming from highly scattering materials. These processing algorithms are based on designing a filter that has large gain at frequencies where the SNR is high and low gain at frequencies where SNR is small. However, this technique does not consider two important ultrasonic effects: the finite-time duration of the flaw UT signal coming from a defect and the distortion of the frequency components of the traveling wave-front due to the dispersion. In this work, a time-frequency Wiener filter is proposed that takes into account these two characteristics. Experimental results are presented, showing that the proposed time-frequency algorithm has an excellent performance on SNR enhancement.

Journal Article↗