The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 14, 1999
Filed:
Sep. 29, 1998
Applicant:
Inventors:
Sverre Holm, Asker, NO;
Hongxia Yao, Oslo, NO;
Assignee:
General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY (US);
Attorneys:
Primary Examiner:
Assistant Examiner:
Int. Cl.
CPC ...
A61B / ;
U.S. Cl.
CPC ...
600447 ; 600443 ;
Abstract
An ultrasound imaging system uses a synthetic transmit aperture method with prefocused subapertures. The transmit aperture is divided into several subapertures. Transmission is done sequentially on each subaperture while receiving on the full aperture. The received data sets are then combined using the appropriate delays. In this way the focusing performance of a composite focusing system using a number of focal zones equal to the square of the number of subapertures is achieved. The gain is an increase in the frame rate which is also equal to the number of subapertures used.