General Electric Company

Siemens Medical Solutions USA, Inc.

Boston Scientific Scimed, Inc.

Hewlett-Packard Company

Acuson Corporation

Lewis Jones Thomas, Iii

Richard Yung Chiao

Anne Lindsay Hall

Robert S Gilmore

Kenneth B Welles, Ii

Casmir R Trzaskos

Matthew N O'Donnell

Homer H Glascock, Ii

Michael Kent Cueman

Wenguang Li

Sharbel E Noujaim

Anming He Cai

Christopher M Daft

William E Engeler

Charles D Greskovich

Samuel H Maslak

Lowell Scott Smith

Gregory L Holley

Robert J Dunki-Jacobs

Patrick J Phillips

Hewlett E Melton, Jr

Kai Erik Thomenius

Seth D Silverstein

Kenneth Wayne Rigby

Worth B Walters

Thomas J Hunt

Ralph Allen Hewes

Thomas A Shoup

Timothy L Proulx

Richard B Bernardi

August David Matula

Kenneth M Fowkes

Michael J Harsh

Xuan-Ming Lu

James G Miller

Michael J Austin

A method for real-time displaying of cross-sectional images during an intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging procedure includes, during an intravascular ultrasound imaging procedure, receiving electrical signals from at least one transducer in a catheter as the at least one transducer rotates and moves longitudinally along a lumen of a patient blood vessel; during the intravascular ultrasound imaging procedure, processing the received electrical signals to form a series of cross-sectional images that are longitudinally-offset from one another along a length of the lumen; during the intravascular ultrasound imaging procedure, concurrently displaying i) a most recent image and ii) a previous image that is either a) selected by the operator or b) automatically selected as having a maximum or minimum of a selected image characteristic; and, during the intravascular ultrasound imaging procedure, updating the display of the most recent image as a new image from the series of cross-sectional images is processed.

Systems and methods for selection and displaying of images using an intravascular ultrasound imaging system

A medical imaging assembly includes an elongated catheter having a connector at the proximal end; an array of transducers on the distal end of the catheter; conductors electrically coupled to the array of transducers and in electrical communication with the connector of the catheter; and a control unit coupleable to the catheter to send and receive electrical signals between the control unit and the array of transducers through the connector of the catheter. The control unit has a processor to execute instructions including 1) selecting a first subset of M transmitting transducers and a second subset of N receiving transducers from the array of transducers, where N&#x3e;M; and 2) for each of at least N transmit/receive cycles, a) directing the first subset of M transmitting transducers to transmit an acoustic signal; and b) directing the second subset of N receiving transducers to receive corresponding echo signals.

Imaging devices with an array of transducers and methods of manufacture and use

In kmode, a vibration is along an axis or orthogonal to the poling or electric field orientation. The direction of vibration is toward a face of an ultrasound transducer array. For each element of the array, electrodes are formed perpendicular to the face of the array, such as along the sides of the elements. Piezoelectric material is poled along a dimension parallel with the face of the transducer and perpendicular to the direction of acoustic energy propagation. Using elements designed for kresonant mode operation may provide for a better electrical impedance match, such as where small elements sizes are provided for a multi-dimensional transducer arrays. For additional impedance matching, the elements may be made from multiple layers of piezoelectric ceramic. Since the elements operate from a kmode, the layers are stacked along the poling direction or perpendicular to a face of the transducer array for transmitting or receiving acoustical energy.

Multi-dimensional ultrasound transducer array

In one embodiment, a medical image viewer in compliance with a medical image standard is provided, and a file in compliance with the medical image standard is provided to the medical image viewer. The medical image standard specifies a first field for data not in compliance with the medical image standard and a second field for data in compliance with the medical image standard. The first field of the file comprises medical image data, and the second field of the file comprises information that can be used to obtain software to at least one of display and manipulate the medical image data. The software is obtained, and at least one of the following is performed with the software: displaying the medical image data and manipulating the medical image data. Other embodiments are provided, and each of the embodiments described herein can be used alone or in combination with one another.

Method and system for displaying and/or manipulating medical image data

A diagnostic medical imaging system is disclosed, such as a diagnostic medical ultrasound system, which uses operational rules or an anatomic model of an anatomical structure as an organizational framework for applying anatomy-specific auxiliary/secondary information. After processing the operational rules on the acquired images or associating the model with the acquired images, adapting/fitting the model to match the images if necessary, the imaging system can associate aspects of the images being acquired with the auxiliary/secondary information, allowing the imaging system to behave as if it 'knows' what it is scanning. The auxiliary information may be rules that affect the behavior of the imaging system, or may be the acquired image samples. System behavior may then be automatically adapted or the operator may be prompted to make operational changes.

System and method for adapting the behavior of a diagnostic medical ultrasound system based on anatomic features present in ultrasound images

A medical diagnostic ultrasound imaging method fires a sequence of pulses into a body and then receives, beamforms, weights and sums the resulting echo signals to suppress first order echoes. The sequence of pulses includes at least two pulses that differ in amplitude and phase. In one form, no two pulses of the sequence have the same amplitude and opposite phase. In another form, only linear echoes are suppressed. In a third form, second and third order echoes are preserved while linear echoes are suppressed.

Medical diagnostic ultrasound system using contrast pulse sequence imaging

Coded excitation for medical ultrasound imaging is implemented by transmitting code or element symbols in the encoded base sequence on different firings. The encoded base sequence is formed by convolving a base sequence with an oversampled code sequence. For each firing the designated code or element symbol in the encoded base sequence is replaced by a unit symbol (i.e., 1 or -1) while the other symbol locations are all set to zero. After each transmit, the received waveform is multiplied by the respective symbols and accumulated to synthesize the received encoded waveform.

Ultrasonic imaging system with beamforming using unipolar or bipolar

A method and apparatus for improving the SNR in medical ultrasound imaging utilize Golay-coded excitation of the transducer array. A Golay pair is a pair of binary (+1,-1) sequences with the property that the sum of the autocorrelations of the two sequences is a Kronecker delta function. This translates into two important advantages over codes in general: (1) Golay codes have no range sidelobes, and (2) Golay codes can be transmitted using only a bipolar pulser versus a more expensive digital-to-analog converter. Degradation of the Golay code is avoided by employing multiple focal zones, where the Golay code is used only in the deepest focal zones in order to minimize dynamic focusing effects, and by employing two consecutive transmits on each beam to minimize tissue motion between the two code sequences.

Method and apparatus for ultrasonic beamforming using golay-coded

Signal-to-noise ratio in medical ultrasound imaging is improved by using Golay-encoded excitation of a transducer array. Two orthogonal Golay pairs of sequences are transmitted to respective transmit focal zones. Start of transmission of the Golay pair to the second zone is delayed until shortly after the start of transmission of the Golay pair to the first transmit focal zone such that the two pairs of firings are overlapped in time. The receive filtering follows two parallel paths, one for each focal zone. Each decoding filter (also used for bandpass filtering) supplies its output signal to a vector summer, the output signal of which is multiplexed to conventional B-mode processing (envelope detection, logarithmic compression and edge-enhancement filter), followed by scan conversion for display.

Ultrasonic beamforming with improved signal-to-noise ratio using

A method and an apparatus for adaptively suppressing incoherent data in a coherent imaging system. A focused ultrasound beam is transmitted with conventional transmit beamforming time delays. The returning echo signals are processed along two separate receive signal processing paths. The time delays along one processing path are set for traditional coherent receive beamforming, while the time delays along the other processing path are set to apply incoherent summing to the same set of return signals (e.g., time delays equal to zero). Then at each point in the receive beam or vector, the coherent and incoherent summation signals are compared. If the coherent and incoherent summation signals are of like amplitude, the beamformed signal of the first processing path is deemed incoherent, and its display is suppressed in the final image.

Method and apparatus for coherence imaging

Signal-to-noise ratio in synthetic transmit aperture imaging is significantly increased by encoding the transmit signals in orthogonal complementary codes for multiple point sources to be transmitted simultaneously. A number N of elements of a transducer array are simultaneously activated to transmit unfocused ultrasound waves during each one of N transmit events. For each transmit event, a different set of N code sequences is applied by a controller to N pulsers for the transducers to drive the transducers. The imaging depth is divided into several zones and code lengths are employed which increase with depth. A Hadamard construct of the orthogonal complementary sets, which requires only 2N correlations for decoding, is used.

Method and apparatus for ultrasonic synthetic transmit aperture imaging

The frame rate in medical ultrasound imaging is increased significantly by reducing the number of transmit events per image frame using spatially encoded transmit events in accordance with an invertible encoding matrix. First, M sets of encoded signals are transmitted, one set after the next, from M transmitting elements of a transducer array. For each transmission, all M transmitting elements are activated simultaneously in accordance with the encoding of a particular set of signals. The resulting scattering data are stored for each of the M transmit events, and are subsequently decoded with the inverse of the encoding matrix to obtain individual elemental information. The complete set of scattering data captures the time history of the ultrasound pulses that are transmitted from a single transducer element of the phased array, such as the m-th transmitter element, scattered by the medium under investigation, and subsequently received at the n-th receiver element, for all M transmitters and N receivers. The invertible code is preferably an orthogonal phase code such as a Hadamard code.

Method and apparatus for ultrasonic beamforming with spatially encoded

An improved two-dimensional ultrasonic transducer array is provided by forming a plurality of elongated transducer strips each including a central body of piezoelectric material having mounted thereon a conducting inner matching layer and outer matching layer, a conducting inner backing layer and a nonconducting lossy outer backing layer, depositing a conducting film on the outer surface and one side surface of the outer matching layer and into electrical contact with the conducting backing layer of each strip and depositing a plurality of conducting films in space relation to one another on the back surface and one side surface of the lossy backing layer and into electrical contact with the conducting backing layer to provide an electric circuit to the front and back faces of the piezoelectric layer. The strips are then assembled in spaced parallel relation with insulating strips bonded therebetween, and grooves are cut transversely of the transducer strip through the matching layers, the piezoelectric layer, the inner backing layer and into but not through the lossy backing layer to thereby provide an array of individual transducers arranged in spaced parallel rows with conducting films extending from the face and back surfaces of each transducer to provide an independent electrical circuit to each transducer in the array.

Method of making a two dimensional ultrasonic transducer array

A time domain technique for implementing an adaptive wall filter improves imaging of low-velocity blood flow by removing signals associated with slowly moving tissue. Adaptive wall filtering is performed by estimating wall velocity and bandwidth, and then filtering the basebanded data with a complex time domain notch filter. The wall velocity estimate determines the center frequency of a wall signal while the wall variance estimate determines the wall signal bandwidth. The complex filter coefficients selected are those which will center the complex notch filter on the wall center frequency, and which will set the filter cutoff frequencies (measured from this center frequency) to match the wall signal bandwidth.

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Palo Alto, CA, United States of America

Lewis Jones Thomas, Iii