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:
Aug. 10, 2004
Filed:
Oct. 20, 2001
Xufeng Xi, Mountain View, CA (US);
Glen McLaughlin, Saratoga, CA (US);
Umit Tarakci, Fall City, WA (US);
Zonare Medical Systems, Inc., Mountain View, CA (US);
Abstract
Systems and methods of generating and manipulating an ultrasound beam are disclosed. The methods include using selective sets of ultrasound elements to generate an ultrasound beam, scanning the beam over a series of ultrasound elements in order to collected echo data covering an area, and generating an image from the resulting data. The scanning process includes shifting the set of ultrasound elements used to form the ultrasound beam by more then one ultrasound element (block-switching) between each step in the scanning process. This is accomplished without loss of image resolution by using area-forming techniques. The block-switching technique enables use of cross-correlation methods during image construction.