Ultrasound system for high-speed and high resolution imaging applications

An ultrasound imaging system comprising:

• a multi-element set of ultrasound transducer elements;
• an excitation pulse generator providing a succession of excitation pulses to the transducer elements;
• a receiving switch matrix modulating echoes received by the transducer elements in response to the excitation pulses applied to an object, with an essentially random sequence of modulation coefficients;
• a circuit summing the modulated echoes in the analog domain;
• and
• an image reconstruction processor configured to computer-process the summed modulated echoes into one or more images of the object.

An ultrasound imaging system having an echo-signal receiving chain comprising:

• an array containing a total of L acoustic transducer elements configured to receive echo acoustic pressure waves from an imaged target and convert the received pressure waves to electrical signals, where L is a positive integer greater than one;
• a switch matrix configured to modulate the electrical signals from the transducer elements and supply the modulated signals to one or more summation nodes;
• one or more amplifiers performing summation and amplification of the modulated echo signals from the switch matrix summed at the summation nodes;
• an analog-to-digital converter configured to convert an output signal from the one or more amplifiers to digital form;
• and
• an image reconstruction module configured to reconstruct an ultrasound image of the target from an output of the analog-to-digital converter according to a reconstruction algorithm.

An ultrasound imaging system having an echo-signal receiving chain that comprises:

• an array containing a total of L acoustic transducer elements that receive an echo acoustic pressure wave from an imaged target and convert the received pressure wave to electrical echo signals, where L is an integer greater than one;
• a switch matrix configured to select two or more disjoint subsets of the elements of the transducer array and to connect the subsets to different summation nodes;
• an amplifier associated to each of the summation nodes and configured to perform echo signal summation and amplification;
• an analog-to-digital converter converting an output signal from each of the amplifiers to digital form;
• and
• an image reconstruction module configured to operate according to a reconstruction algorithm that reconstructs an ultrasound image of the target from outputs of the analog-to-digital converters.

An ultrasound imaging system having an acoustic waveform transmission chain that comprises:

• a digital-to-analog converter configured to convert a digital excitation waveform to analog form;
• a power amplifier configured to amplify an output signal from the digital-to-analog converter;
• a switch matrix configured to receive the amplified signal, pseudo-randomly select only a subset of the elements of the transducer array during a single acoustic pressure wave transmission, and connect only the elements of the subset to the output of the power amplifier;
• and
• an array of a total of L acoustic transducer elements that receive electric signals from the switch matrix and convert the received electrical signals to acoustic pressure wave, where L is an integer greater than one.

An ultrasound imaging method comprising:

• sending ultrasound energy into an object from an array of ultrasound transducer elements and receiving responses to ultrasound energy emitted from the object for with said array;
• modulating the responses with irregular sequences of modulation coefficients;
• combining the modulated responses in the analog domain;
• and
• computer-processing the combined modulated responses into one or more images of the object.