General Electric Company

Patrick Noret

Rowland F Saunders

Matthew E Ellis

James A Smith

A method and an apparatus for increasing the apparent acoustic frame rate of ultrasound images. Frames of acoustic data are acquired at the acoustic frame rate, stored in double-buffered acoustic frame buffers and scan converted one after the other. For each pair of successive frames, the first acoustic frame is stored in a frame delay buffer while the other acoustic frame is being scan converted. In accordance with this scheme, the scan converter is always reading from an acoustic frame buffer that contains a single complete frame of acoustic data, thereby eliminating the swirl artifact. To increase the apparent acoustic frame rate, the scan-converted acoustic data is input to a scan-converted frame interpolator, which incorporates the frame delay buffer, a frame interpolator programmable read only memory (PROM) and a software-programmable inter-polator bank select look-up table. The frame interpolator PROM incorporates a two-point FIR filter which outputs a frame of interpolated scan-converted acoustic data X.sub.n ' in response to input of the scan-converted acoustic data X.sub.n and X.sub.n-1. A predetermined number of unique frames of scan-converted acoustic data X.sub.n ' can be generated from the acoustic data X.sub.n and X.sub.n-1 of a given pair of frames by changing the weighting factors at the video rate while recycling the scan-converted acoustic data of the given pair of frames.

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Montigny, France

Patrick Noret