Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.v.

Michael Burcher

Karl E Thiele

Brent Stephen Robinson

Jean-Luc Robert

Clifford Cooley

The present disclosure provides for a system that is adapted to simultaneously display photoacoustic and ultrasound images of the same object. An image combiner can perform spatial and temporal interpolation of the two images before generating a combined image. The combined image is then displayed on a display such as an LCD or CRT. The system is able to use motion estimates obtained from the ultrasound data to enhance the photoacoustic image thereby increasing its apparent frame rate, registering consecutive frames in order to reduce artifacts. The system is capable of generating combined ultrasound and photoacoustic images which are registered spatially and temporally.

Combined photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging system

An ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system transmits a plurality of focused beams normal to the plane of a transducer aperture and receives multiple receive lines in response to each transmitted beam. Sub-apertures of the transducer aperture are defined by apodization and signals of the sub-apertures are aligned and combined to produce signals exhibiting the effect of transmit steering at different angles with respect to the sub-apertures. The steered signals are detected and the detected signals relating to common points in an image field are combined. The combined detected signals are used to produce an ultrasound image with reduced speckle.

Retrospective dynamic transmit focusing for spatial compounding

The present disclosure is directed to a combined photoacoustic (PA) and ultrasound imaging system capable of generating PA and ultrasound images simultaneously. These images can be combined and displayed in real-time. The PA images are acquired by firing a illumination system into a sample being imaged and beamforming the received photoacoustic signals. Ultrasound images are formed by transmitting ultrasound energy into the object and beamforming the reflected signals. The present disclosure describes a timing controller to allow the illumination system and ultrasound transmissions to be timed relative to one another. This allows both modalities to operate at close to their maximum frame rates while preventing signal interference.

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Tarrytown, NY, United States of America

Michael Burcher