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:
Nov. 14, 2000
Filed:
Feb. 23, 1999
Richard Yung Chiao, Clifton Park, NY (US);
Lewis Jones Thomas, III, Tokoyo, JP;
General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY (US);
Abstract
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.