A simulator of phase aberrations for mathematical modeling of two-dimensional (2-D) ultrasonic medical imaging is developed. Principal characteristics of expected phase aberrations were put into the model to investigate the distorting influence of intervening tissues on the quality of conventional medical B-scan images. Information necessary for numerical simulations, including the form of the phase correlation function, correlation length and distortion magnitude, was obtained from analysis of known experimental data on abdominal and breast imaging in vivo. Examples of simulated acoustical images of some simple phantoms are presented. Improvement of image quality due to one simple phase adaptation algorithm is also presented.
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