Ultrasound imaging with speckle suppression via direct rectification of signals

Abstract

Described herein are systems and methods for suppressing speckle noise in ultrasound imaging. In an embodiment, speckle noise suppression is provided by incoherently summing echo waves that impinge the active aperture of the transducers. This incoherent summation prevents echo waves from destructively interfering and therefore prevents the signal 'nulls' that characterize speckle noise. In an exemplary embodiment, the incoherent summation is performed by sub-dividing a transducer into a plurality of smaller transducers and incoherently summing the electrical signals from the smaller transducers. In one exemplary embodiment, each of the smaller transducers is coupled to a separate rectifier, which rectifies the electrical signal from the respective transducer into a rectified signal. The rectified signals from the rectifiers are then summed to provide the incoherent summation.