Apparatus and system for real-time synthetic focus ultrasonic imaging

An ultrasonic image processing architecture including:

• a plurality of ultrasonic transducers elements, each of said plurality of ultrasonic transducer elements including an ultrasonic transmitter and an ultrasonic receiver;
• a plurality of analog-to-digital converters, each of said plurality of analog-to-digital converters operatively coupled to an associated ultrasonic transducer element in said plurality of ultrasonic transducer elements;
• a plurality of image generation processors, each of said plurality of image generation processors having an input operatively coupled to an associated analog-to-digital converter in said plurality of analog-to-digital converters and an output;
• and
• wherein each of said image generation processors further includes a memory configured to store a plurality of digitized image data sets received from said associated analog-to-digital converters, and a plurality of address generators configured to output memory address locations associated with each of said plurality of digitized image data sets.

A method for ultrasonic imaging of a sample material including the steps of:

• propagating a pulse of ultrasonic energy towards the surface of the sample material from a single source;
• receiving a plurality of return echoes at a plurality of points for a predetermined sample period;
• digitizing each of said plurality of return echoes;
• storing each of said digitized plurality of return echoes;
• utilizing said stored digitized plurality of return echoes, together with at least one coefficient parameter, to generate a first ultrasonic image;
• at least once, altering said at least one coefficient parameter and generating a second ultrasonic image utilizing said stored digitized plurality of return echoes together with said altered at least one coefficient parameter.

A method for generating an ultrasonic image of a sample material from an ultrasonic transducer array having a plurality of ultrasonic transmitter and receiver elements, including the steps of:

• pulsing, in a predetermined sequence, each of said plurality of ultrasonic transmitter elements;
• receiving, at each of said plurality of ultrasonic receiver elements, an ultrasonic return echo data set for each of said pulses;
• storing each of said received ultrasonic return echo data sets in a memory associated each of said plurality of ultrasonic receiver elements;
• extracting in parallel, from each stored received ultrasonic return echo data set, an image pixel component;
• combining each of said extracted image pixel components to generate a single image pixel in the ultrasonic image;
• and
• repeating the steps of extracting and combining for a complete set of image pixels in the ultrasonic image.