Time of flight

Now that the basic physics of ultrasound have been

discussed, you are ready for an important concept in
ultrasound imaging. We can tell where an echo is coming
from, by measuring the time of flight. Time of flight is
defined as the time ultrasound takes to travel from the
transducer to the reflector and back.

In fact this is nothing more than a calculation of the time

ultrasound travels over a defined distance. The time of
flight TT (in seconds) is given by:

T=2DcT=2Dc
Where DD (in metres) is defined as the distance between the
probe and reflector. We already know cc (in metres per
second), i.e. the speed of sound, that differs per medium.
When an ultrasound pulse is issued, the transducer has a
certain listening time. During this time, the transducer has to
wait for the incoming reflection, before the next pulse can be
sent out. The location of the reflection can now be determined,
as this information is now trapped in our time of flight
parameter T. In soft tissue, you can use as a rule of thumb that

every 13 s of go-return (listening) time means that the

reflector is 1 cm deeper in the body.
In conventional ultrasound imaging, you may see that this
simple rule is one of the main determinants of the time needed
to build an image. The 2D images (B-scans) you have seen
are made up of many listening lines or scan lines, which need
to be composed consecutively. If 128 scan lines are used and
the listening depth is 8 cm, for example, the time needed to
compose this image is 2 x 0.08 / 1500 x 128 = 0.014 seconds.
We can do this 0.014-1 times each second. So our maximum
refresh rate, or frame rate, will be 73 Hz.
Of course, this applies only to the conventional way of
ultrasound imaging, in which scan lines must be acquired
consecutively. With current computing capabilities and
innovative ultrasound system architecture, ultrafast imaging is
possible. By scanning multiple lines at the same time, the
refresh rate is no longer determined by the number of scan
lines, but by the distance of the reflector. Where abdominal
imaging uses typical refresh rates of 20 Hz, for example,
ultrafast imaging can improve this to 3800 Hz. The articles and
videos in this course however, are still based on the
conventional architecture of (most of) the ultrasound devices.
You will learn more about the time an image is created and the
related refresh rate of the image in the step Resolution.