Ultrasound diagnostic apparatus and an ultrasound signal processing method

An ultrasound diagnostic apparatus that transmits an ultrasound beam to a subject using an ultrasound probe including a plurality of transducers and generates acoustic line signal subframe data on the basis of a reflected wave obtained from the subject, the ultrasound diagnostic apparatus comprising:

• a transmitter that sets a focal point defining a converging point of an ultrasound beam in the subject and causes a plurality of transmission transducer arrays selected from the plurality of transducers to transmit the ultrasound beam to converge at the converging point;
• a receiver that generates a reception signal sequence for each of the transducers of the ultrasound probe on the basis of the reflected wave received by the ultrasound probe from the subject;
• and
• a delay-and-sum part that performs delay-and-sum operation on the reception signal sequence based on the reflected wave obtained within an ultrasound beam main irradiation region to generate acoustic line signal subframe data for a plurality of on-line observation points present in a target line group passing through the focal point among a plurality of intra-region observation points corresponding to the position within the ultrasound beam main irradiation region,
• wherein the receiver includes a plurality of part receivers that generates the reception signal sequence on the basis of the reflected wave received by each of the transducers included in a partial transducer array from the subject for each of a plurality of the partial transducer arrays obtained by dividing the transmission transducer array,
• the delay-and-sum part includes:
• a plurality of part delay-and-sum parts that performs delay-and-sum on the reception signal sequence corresponding to the plurality of partial transducer arrays to generate an acoustic line signal for the plurality of on-line observation points so as to generate acoustic line signal partial subframe data corresponding to each of the plurality of partial transducer arrays;
• a plurality of part folding parts that extracts an acoustic line signal sequence corresponding to the plurality of on-line observation points from the acoustic line signal partial subframe data corresponding to each of the plurality of partial transducer arrays, and that arranges the acoustic line signals with reduced intervals between the target lines included in the target line group to generate acoustic line signal partial subframe folded data;
• a main summing part that sums the acoustic line signal partial subframe folded data corresponding to each of the plurality of partial transducer arrays on the basis of the positions of the arranged observation points to generate acoustic line signal subframe folded data;
• and
• a re-sequence part that re-sequences the acoustic line signals in the acoustic line signal subframe folded data to the positions of the on-line observation points in the main irradiation region to generate the acoustic line signal subframe data.