Synthetic transmit focusing ultrasound system with speed of sound aberration correction

An ultrasound imaging system which corrects for speed of sound variation in an image field comprising:

• a transducer array probe;
• a transmit beamformer coupled to the probe and adapted to transmit ultrasound beams which encompass a plurality of adjacent receive line locations;
• a multiline beamformer coupled to the probe and adapted to produce a plurality of adjacent multilines in response to a transmit beam;
• a phase aberration estimator coupled to receive multilines produced by the multiline beamformer and adapted to estimate phase variation at points in an image field for both transmit and receive, the estimator adapted to estimate transmit phase variation by operating on data of a plurality of multilines corresponding to the same line location and adapted to estimate receive phase variation by operating on data of a plurality of multilines received at a plurality of line locations in response to a single transmit event, the estimator further adapted to remove phase variation from the multilines;
• synthetic transmit focusing circuitry coupled to the multiline beamformer and adapted to produce multilines with a transmit focus effect;
• and
• a display, coupled to the synthetic transmit focusing circuitry, and adapted to display an ultrasound image based on the multilines with a transmit focus effect and the removed phase variation.