Siemens Medical Solutions Usa, Inc.

David P Duncan

Liexiang Fan

Yassin Labyed

Seungsoo Kim

Stephen J Hsu

Ismayil M Guracar

Manoj G Menon

Stephen J Rosenzweig

Nikolas Ivancevich

Xiaozheng Zeng

Gilles D Guenette

Ultrasound beamformer-based channel data compression allows for software-based image formation. To increase the amount of data transferred, ultrasound beamformer-based channel data compression is provided. A beamformer is used to compress instead of or in addition to traditional beamformation. The compression reduces the data bandwidth while allowing reconstruction of the original channel data.

Ultrasound beamformer-based channel data compression

By identifying locations of contrast agent response, an intensity-based metric of contrast agent signal is used to control a duration of microbubble destruction with a medical ultrasound scanner. Feedback from motion of the transducer may be used to indicate when a user perceives enough destruction. A combination of both an intensity-based metric and transducer motion may be used to control the duration of bursting.

Microbubble destruction for medical ultrasound imaging

Shear wave propagation is used to estimate the speed of sound in a patient. An ultrasound scanner detects a time of occurrence of a shear wave at each of multiple locations. The difference in time of occurrence, given tissue stiffness or shear velocity, is used to estimate the speed of sound for the specific tissue of the patient.

Sound speed imaging using shear waves

For sound speed imaging, different receive apertures are used instead of multiple transmissions from different angles. Acoustic echoes from a same transmission are receive beamformed with different apertures of the transducer array. The axial shift between the beamformed signals from the different apertures is used to solve for the speed of sound at one or more locations. The resulting measure of the speed of sound is displayed as the speed of sound in the tissue and may be diagnostically or prognostically useful.

Compressional sound speed imaging using ultrasound

Shadow suppression is provided in ultrasound imaging, such as in steered spatial compounding. Using a transform or other approach, the data of a frame of data along the steering direction is projected. The projection is used to determine weights. The frame is weighted with the projection-based weights, reducing or removing shadows based on the one frame rather than based on registration with other frames. In the steered spatial compounding example, a compounded frame with independently shadow suppressed component frames may have little or no fork-like image artifacts due to shadowing.

Shadow suppression in ultrasound imaging

In contrast agent imaging, a beamformer and transducer scan a region of a patient having contrast agents. A detector detects the contrast agents with at least two different contrast agent imaging techniques from ultrasound data resulting from the scanning. A processor compares responses of the contrast agents detected between the at least two different contrast agent imaging techniques and selects a relative contribution of the at least two different contrast agent imaging techniques. The selection is based on the comparing. Contrast agent imaging of the patient is performed using at least one of the contrast agent imaging techniques. The performance is based on the selected relative contribution.

Contrast agent sensitive medical ultrasound imaging

Sparse tracking is used in acoustic radiation force impulse imaging. The tracking is performed sparsely. The displacements are measured only one or a few times for each receive line. While this may result in insufficient information to determine the displacement phase shift and/or maximum displacement over time, the resulting displacement samples for different receive lines as a function of time may be used together to estimate the velocity, such as with a Radon transform. The estimation may be less susceptible to noise from the scarcity of displacement samples by using compressive sensing.

Sparse tracking in acoustic radiation force impulse imaging

In ARFI imaging, a cost function is used to identify a time of displacement that best or sufficiently indicates the desired information. For example, the displacements associated with a combination of contrast and signal-to-noise ratio are identified. The time at which the desired displacements occur may be other than the time of the maximum. Since the time is common to displacements for one or more scan lines, the displacement image may be assembled line-by-line or by groups of lines.

Ultrasound ARFI displacement imaging using an adaptive time instance

Shear wave imaging is provided in medical diagnostic ultrasound. The generation of a shear wave with acoustic energy forms a pseudo shear wave (an apparent wave) traveling towards the transducer. Transmission and reception along a single line may be used to detect the pseudo shear wave traveling towards the transducer. The shear velocity or characteristic may be determined without reception along multiple laterally spaced scan lines. One transmission to generate the shear wave may be used. With multi-beam receive or without, calculating shear velocity from along a single line allows rapid determination.

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Renton, WA, United States of America

David P Duncan