General Electric Company

Ge Medical Systems Global Technology Company, LLC

Richard Marion Kulakowski

Larry Y L Mo

Michael J Washburn

Lihong Pan

Qian Zhang Adams

A method and system for controlling an ultrasound system are provided. The method includes processing image data received from an ultrasound system to obtain a time gain compensation correction curve, wherein the image data is internally time gain compensated. The method further includes processing the image data using the time gain compensation correction curve and user inputs parameters. The user input parameters include at least one of a user defined time gain compensation parameter and a user defined dynamic range parameter.

Method and system of controlling ultrasound systems

An ultrasound system is disclosed that includes a method and apparatus to automatically adjust certain parameters that affect visualization of a Doppler spectral image. The ultrasound system acquires spectral lines of Doppler data generated by the ultrasound system. A data processor within the ultrasound system determines the presence of aliasing and estimates noise levels from the spectral lines of Doppler data. The data processor then automatically adjusts system parameters such as pulse repetition frequency (PRF), baseline shift, and spectrum orientation in response to aliasing and noise levels. The data processor of the ultrasound system also determines positive and negative signal boundaries for each spectral line of Doppler data and a display architecture processes the signal boundary data to display a spectral trace corresponding to the edges of the spectral lines.

Method and apparatus for automatic control of spectral doppler imaging

An ultrasound transmitter generates ultrasound signals at an adjustable pulse repetition rate. A Doppler unit generates Doppler signals from ultrasound backscattered signals and stores them in a memory. A logic unit performs an algorithm which automatically adjusts the polarity and position of the velocity scale of a display and automatically adjusts the pule repetition rate of the transmitter based on analysis of the signals.

Automatic adjustment of velocity scale and pulse repetition frequency for doppler ultrasound spectrograms

A method and an apparatus for adaptive wall (high-pass) filtering to remove low-frequency clutter in spectral Doppler I/Q data prior to FFT processing. The I/Q data is passed through a low-pass filter which rejects the flow frequency components above the clutter frequency range. The total power of the low-pass filter output is then computed. A system noise model is used to predict the mean system noise power in the low-pass filter output. The predicted mean noise power provides a noise threshold to gage how much clutter power is present in the current FFT packet. If no significant clutter is present, then wall filter selection logic will automatically select the lowest wall filter cutoff frequency stored in a filter coefficient LUT. If significant clutter power is present in the FFT packet, then the mean and variance of the clutter frequency over the FFT packet are estimated and then input into the filter selection logic, which selects the most suitable filter cutoff for the current clutter signal.

Method and apparatus for adaptive wall filtering in spectral Doppler ultrasound imaging

A method and an apparatus for suppressing background noise in spectral Doppler imaging using adaptive noise-reduction low-pass filters. A pair of adaptive low-pass filters are arranged in the two audio Doppler channels for suppressing background noise in the audio Doppler data. The low-pass filtering can be implemented in the frequency domain, i.e., before the IFFT operation, or in the time domain, i.e., after the IFFT operation. Maximum frequency traces are fed into a filter selection block which prescribes the filter cutoffs of the low-pass filters.

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Richfield, WI, United States of America

Richard Marion Kulakowski