2D ultrasound imaging with pulsed wave Doppler or color flow imaging
AssigneeB-K Medical Aps
InventorBo Martins
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An ultrasound imaging system includes receive circuitry (110) configured to receive electrical signals from ultrasound transducer elements wherein the electrical signals are indicative of sensed ultrasound echo signals. The system further includes an image process (114) configured to process the electrical signals and generate a 2-D image. The system further includes a vessel wall identifier (116) configured to identify at least a proximal wall and a distal wall of a vessel in the B-mode image from the B-image employing a signal mirroring technique. The system further includes a rendering engine (124) configured to display the 2-D image on a display (126) with graphical indicia corresponding to the identified proximal wall and distal wall superimposed over the vessel in the 2-D image.
Claims20
An ultrasound imaging system, comprising:
- receive circuitry configured to receive electrical signals from ultrasound transducer elements, wherein the electrical signals are indicative of sensed ultrasound echo signals, including echo signals from a vessel;
- a pre-processor configured to digitize the electrical signals and to process samples of the digitized electrical signals to detect envelope values and output signals of samples of envelope values;
- an image processor configured to process the signals of samples of envelope values and generate a B-mode image that includes the vessel;
- a vessel wall identifier configured to generate in image of mirror strength values corresponding to the pixels in the B-mode image, wherein the vessel wall identifier is configured to, for each pixel in the B-mode image values:
- weight a first set of samples of the signal of envelope values with a first set of weights, thereby generating a first weighted signal, wherein the first set of weights has a first length;
- weight a second set of samples of the signal of envelope values with a second set of weights, thereby generating a second weighted signal, wherein the second set of weights has the first length,
- wherein the first set of samples and the second set of samples are separated by one or more samples of the signal of envelope values;
- subtract the samples of the second weighted signal from corresponding samples of the first weighted signal generating a weighted sum of samples having a length of the first length plus one
- generate a mirroring strength value by dividing the weighted sum by the first length;
- wherein the vessel wall identifier is further configured to subtract the image of mirroring strength values from the B-mode image and threshold a result of the subtraction to generate a fluid mask out echo tissue signal inside the vessel with a predetermined threshold value.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.