Siemens Medical Systems, Inc.

Other

Waters Instruments, Inc.

Applied Physiology and Medicine

John R Klepper

Keiichi Murakami

Mark A Moehring

Levin F Nock

Hirohide Miwa

John M Reid

Takaki Shimura

Barry Friemel

Mark A Curry

Zuhua Mao

Thomas A Burton

Merrill P Spencer

Lin-Xin Yao

Tat-Jin Teo

Hong Wang

Wolf Delong

Abdelaziz Chihoub

Ekkehard Blanz

Rodney Boleyn

Tai-Kyong Song

George F Sedivy

Richard F Ferraro

Donald L Davis

A BcD mode ultrasound imaging system including a Doppler processor which is configured to receive a Doppler signal having components that are corrupted by residue from color mode interleaving. The Doppler processor is configured to analyze the residue effect and compensate for the residue by filtering the received Doppler signal.

Removing beam interleave effect on doppler spectrum in ultrasound imaging

An ultrasound medical imaging system having a flexible, versatile and programmable architecture, particularly with respect to a back end subsystem. The architecture for the back end subsystem is generalized and includes multiple identical and interchangeable processing elements or boards that combine to produce sufficient processing power to support real time imaging in the various modes of ultrasound operations. The architecture may also tune front end parameters for a front end subsystem based on back end processing, bypass faulty processing elements or boards, and/or distribute processing load across operational processing elements or boards. A method for operating such an ultrasound medical imaging system is also disclosed.

Ultrasound signal processing system

The ultrasound transducer array defines an average row spacing along the elevation for receiving transducer elements that differs from an average row spacing along the elevation for transmitting transducer elements. In one embodiment a relatively 'coarse' row spacing is used for reception and a relatively 'fine' row spacing is used for transmission. The differing spacings lead to different transmit-elevation and receive-elevation beam-patterns. In one configuration the number of transducer elements, and correspondingly the number of ultrasound processing channels, is reduced. In an alternative configuration the beam-pattern 'footprint' is increased without increasing the number of transducer elements or processing channels. The array includes dedicated transmit-only elements and/or dedicated receive-only elements, together with coincident, time-shared transmit/receive elements. The coarse-fine spacings enable improved elevational focus without substantially increasing side lobe levels in a focal plane and far field portion of a resulting beam-pattern.

Coarse-fine ultrasound transducer array for medical imaging

A vibratory energy (ultrasonic) imaging system of the type including a transducer array having a plurality of transducer elements for generating pulses of vibratory energy which are directed towards reflectors and which receive reflections of said vibratory energy and develop echo signals in response thereto. The array comprises a two-dimensional array of transducer elements arranged in a plurality of rows extending in a lateral dimension of the array and a plurality of columns extending in an elevation dimension of the array, at least one of a first type of said columns having elements of a first height in the elevation dimension and at least one of a second type of column having elements of a second height in the elevation dimension which is greater than the first height. In a preferred embodiment of the invention, the first height is an integral fraction of the second height.

2D array for phase aberration correction

An ultrasound imaging system of the type including a 2D transducer array which has first and second types of transducer elements. Each element of the first type occupies an area of the array which is an integral fraction of the area occupied by each element of the second type. A connection arrangement comprising a plurality of multiplexer/summation circuits is provided for electrically connecting the array elements to the remainder of the ultrasound imaging system. Each multiplexer/summation circuit has a plurality of signal inputs individually connected to a respective plurality of the elements of the first type for selectively combining a given number of the elements of the first type together, the given number being an inverse of the integral fraction. In a preferred embodiment of the invention the 2D array is generally rectangular in shape and has elements arranged into rows along its lateral dimension and columns along its elevational dimension, with a first lateral portion of the array including at least one column of elements of the first type and a second lateral portion of the array including columns of elements of the second type. The multiplexer/summation circuit has signal inputs connected individually to each of the elements of a column of the elements of the first type, for selecting the given number of elements to be combined.

Connection arrangement and method of operation of a 2D array for phase

This disclosure relates to a noninvasive means for detecting, counting and characterizing emboli moving through the arterial or venous circulation. An ultrasonic transducer is applied to the skin or other tissues of the subject at sites such as over the temporal bone on either side of the head of the subject, on the neck, on the chest, the abdomen, arm, leg, within the esophagus, or surgically exposed organs or blood vessels. Using standard ultrasonic Doppler techniques, Doppler-shifted signals are located which are proportional to the blood flow velocity in the blood vessel(s) of interest. Spectral analysis is performed on the received signal using the fast Fourier transform or other appropriate technique to determine the frequency components in the Doppler shift spectrum. Further analysis of the spectra is used to delineate and characterize Doppler shift signals due to blood from Doppler shift signals due to emboli having a variety of compositions.

Method and apparatus for ultrasonically detecting, counting and/or

Non-invasive ultrasonic pulse doppler cardiac output monitor

The present invention relates to an apparatus which determines the distribution of the attenuation slope coefficient on a real-time basis using the center frequency shift. In one embodiment, the phase difference between a received signal and a reference signal is determined using EXCLUSIVE OR gates or an inverse trigonometric relation stored in a ROM. The phase difference is input to a differentiator which outputs the center frequency shift of the received signal on a real-time basis. The center frequency shift is input to another differentiator which outputs the attenuation slope coefficient. In other embodiments, the received signal is distributed into received signal bands, having different center frequencies, and signal characteristics of the received signal bands are averaged to remove virtually all effects of spectrum scalloping in the time domain. Thus, the attenuation slope coefficient is obtained without the effects of spectrum scalloping using simple hardware and without Fourier transformation.

Apparatus for measuring the characteristics of an ultrasonic wave medium

The present invention relates to an apparatus which determines the distribution of the attenuation slope coefficient on a real time basis using the center frequency shift. The phase difference between a received signal and a reference signal is determined using EXCLUSIVE OR gates or an inverse trigonometric relation stored in a ROM. The phase difference is input to a differentiator which outputs the center frequency shift of the received signal on a real time basis. The center frequency shift is input to another differentiator which outputs the attenuation slope coefficient. Thus, the attenuation slope coefficient is determined using simple hardware and without calculating the power spectrum and the first moment.

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Seattle, WA, United States of America

John R Klepper