Johnson & Johnson Ultrasound, Inc.

Herbert Perten

William Ambrose

Ralph Scallion

Apparatus for the parallel processing of ultrasonic information to derive simultaneously multiple vectors of ultrasonic information per ultrasonic transmission. In a preferred embodiment, the apparatus includes for each transducer element in a transducer array an analog to digital converter and a delay processing subsystem associated with each analog to digital converter. Each delay processing subsystem includes means for applying a main delay time period to each received digitized signal and a first and a second incremental time delay means for delaying by some additional incremental time period the digitized main delay signal. The output of each first incremental delay means of all of the delay processing subsystems is applied to a first summing network to produce a first vector of time synchronized echo information and, simultaneously, the output of each of the second incremental delay means of each delay processing subsystem is applied to a second summing network which produces a second vector of time synchronized echo information.

Parallel ultrasonic information processing

A thermally developed photographic copier is provided having two controls, one for adjusting the contrast, or blackness, of an image, and another for adjusting background contrast. A microprocessor samples and processes the settings of these controls to produce a video pedestal determined bythe background contrast control, and a gain control signal adjusted for effects of the background contrast setting to keep amplified video singals within the dynamic range necessary for the image contrast setting. Video signals used to expose light-sensitive paper or film are amplified in accordance with the gain control signal and combined with the video pedestal for desired background contrast. The system can automatically modify the gain and video pedestal levels for different lots of paper or film by recording a calibrated grey scale, scanning the recorded grey scale image, comparing the scanned image with previously stored information on the desired image, and modifying the gain and pedestal values as necessary to reproduce images of the desired appearance.

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Pomona, NY, United States of America

Herbert Perten