Acoustic imaging systems utilizing multi-element acoustic transducers in the transmit receive mode suffer from an artifact named dead zone area due to the loss of the acquired information in that area. The artifact shows up on the displayed image as a very bright region due to the receivers saturation next to the transducer face and extending further out in the field as a fixed pattern noise. An investigation of the cause of this artifact, and a method for its elimination is presented in this paper.
