Phase aberration correction in phased-array imaging systems

Abstract

An ultrasonic imaging system for performing a scan in which beamforming time delay errors due to nonuniformity in ultrasound propagation speed within the transmission medium are corrected. The system employs a multiple-channel transmitter and receiver. The method estimates and corrects phase aberrations in phased array imaging systems, taking into account additional information associated with array elements which are not necessarily adjacent to each other. The method uses Kalman filtering to obtain an estimate of the phase differences associated with complex samples of pairs of adjacent receive channels. The method incorporates a scheme to detect and correct for the 2.pi. phase slips that may occur in the data. Because the method provides information on measurement variances, better estimates are obtained by weighting the measurements according to their variances.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.