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:
Jun. 17, 2003
Filed:
Feb. 23, 2001
Constantine Simopoulos, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Kutay F. Üstüner, Mountain View, CA (US);
Anming He Cai, San Jose, CA (US);
Jeffrey T. Rahn, Mountain View, CA (US);
John Jackson, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Matthew O'Donnell, Ann Arbor, MI (US);
Acuson Corporation, Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
A medical ultrasonic imaging system uses an adaptive multi-dimensional back-end mapping stage to eliminate loss of information in the back-end, minimize any back-end quantization noise, reduce or eliminate electronic noise, and map the local average of soft tissue to a target display value throughout the image. The system uses spatial variance to identify regions of the image corresponding substantially to soft tissue and a noise frame acquired with the transmitters turned off to determine the mean system noise level. The system then uses the mean noise level and the identified regions of soft tissue to both locally and adaptively set various back-end mapping stages, including the gain and dynamic range.