Decompression bubble detectors
AssigneeThe Secretary of State for Defence in Her Britannic Majesty's Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
InventorStephen Daniels
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A decompression bubble detector comprises a pulsed ultra-sound transmitter/receiver which is scanned across a cross-section of tissue and the total number of pulse echoes received in a preselected time interval is recorded. Changes in the total number of pulse echoes recorded in successive time intervals are used to monitor the decompression. A single transducer is scanned by means of a driven eccentric cam and a cam follower. A sin/cos potentiometer generates a signal related to the angular position of the transducer connected to a delay so that pulse counting can be arranged to coincide with the passage of the transducer across the target.
Claims12
A decompression bubble detector for detecting decompression bubbles in human tissue comprising a pulsed ultrasonic transmitter, means to scan the transmitter across an area of tissue, a detector to record echoes reflected from said scanned area of tissue, a counter to count the number of echoes recorded by said detector in consecutive preselected time intervals, means for subtracting from said recorded number of echoes a number substantially equal to the average number of echoes recorded at normal atmospheric pressure, and a display means for displaying the resultant difference numbers of echoes recorded in successive preselected time intervals.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.