Diffraction corrections for second harmonic beam fields and effects on the nonlinearity parameter evaluation

The nonlinearity parameter is frequently measured as a sensitive indicator in damaged material characterization or tissue harmonic imaging. Several previous studies have employed the plane wave solution, and ignored the effects of beam diffraction when measuring the non-linearity parameter β. This paper presents a multi-Gaussian beam approach to explicitly derive diffraction corrections for fundamental and second harmonics under quasilinear and paraxial approximation. Their effects on the nonlinearity parameter estimation demonstrate complicated dependence of β on the transmitter-receiver geometries, frequency, and propagation distance. The diffraction effects on the non-linearity parameter estimation are important even in the nearfield region. Experiments are performed to show that improved β values can be obtained by considering the diffraction effects