Method and apparatus for providing dynamically variable time delays for ultrasound beamformer
US5844139A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Dec 30, 1996 |
| Grant date | Dec 1, 1998 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Dec 30, 2016 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG01S7/52046
- WIPO fieldMeasurement
- WIPO sectorInstruments
Abstract
A phased array sector scanning ultrasonic system includes a separate receive channel for each respective element in an ultrasonic transducer array. Each receive channel imparts a delay to the echo signal produced by each respective element. The delayed echo signals are summed to form a steered, dynamically focused and dynamically windowed receive beam even when the transmit beam does not emanate from the center of the array. The receiver has a beamformer including a multiplicity of beamformer channels. The beamformer dynamically increases delays to each channel without introducing unwanted discontinuities, by combining and synchronizing a FIFO and an interpolator. The interpolator uses "Wallace tree" adders to accumulate bit-shifted versions of the inputs. The number of additions is less than the number of bits which would be needed to represent equivalent coefficients. This reduces the hardware relative to a conventional implementation which incorporates multipliers with shifts and adds equaling the number of bits in the coefficients.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.