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:
Jan. 06, 2015
Filed:
Mar. 14, 2013
Fujifilm Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA (US);
Clinton T. Siedenburg, Everett, WA (US);
Juin-Jet Hwang, Mercer Island, WA (US);
Nikolaos Pagoulatos, Bothell, WA (US);
Garet Nenninger, Lake Forest Park, WA (US);
FUJIFILM Sonosite, Inc., Bothell, WA (US);
Abstract
A progressive beamformer in an imaging system includes a number of stages. A first stage delays and combines a number of received data streams to align the streams to a point of interest on a first beamline. The first stage feeds a number of subsequent stages that operate to buffer and re-delay at least a portion of the data streams received from a previous stage in order to align the data streams to a point of interest on a new beamline. In one embodiment, each stage operates to reduce the number of data streams that are passed to a subsequent stage without suffering from grating lobes. A beam reclamation process includes a number of stages that receive data streams from end elements in order to produce reclaimed beams that are added to beamline produced in a mainline beamforming process in order to produce output beamlines.