Ultrasonic imaging device
AssigneeHitachi Medical Corporation
InventorsShin-ichiro Umemura, Hiroshi Kanda, Takashi Azuma
Life of this patent
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Abstract
An ultrasonic imaging device for transmitting/receiving ultrasonic pulses to/from a living body in which microbubbles for contrast are introduced and forming a contrast image of the inside of the living body by using the microbubble for contrast, wherein transmitting/receiving operations are performed N times (N=an integer of three or greater) by using transmission pulse waves having a common envelope signal while varying carrier waves in phase by 360°/N from one wave to another under the same transmission/reception wave focus condition, and by summing N pieces of time-series reception echo signals obtained by the N times of transmitting/receiving operations to obtain a summed signal, thereby forming the contrast image.
Claims7
An ultrasonic imaging device for transmitting/receiving ultrasonic pulse to/from a living body in which microbubbles for contrast are introduced, and forming a contrast image of the inside of the living body, comprising:
- a transmit beamformer for generating a transmit pulse;
- a receive beamformer for generating a time-series reception echo signal with adding receive signals, to each of which a delay time is given for generating receiving sensitivity having directivity;
- an adder for summing the time-series reception echo signals;
- and
- a transmit/receive sequence controller for controlling the transmit beamformer and the receive beamformer;
- wherein the transmit/receive sequence controller controls the transmit beamformer and the receive beamformer to perform transmitting/receiving operations N times (N=an integer of three or greater) by controlling N pieces of transmission pulse waves having a common envelope signal and different waveforms under a transmission/reception wave focus condition, and controlling carrier waves of the transmission pulse waves so to vary in phase by 360°/N from one wave to a next wave, and receiving returned ultrasonic waves as N pieces of the time-series reception echo signals;
- and
- wherein said adder sums the N pieces of the time-series reception echo signals so at to output an output signal as a signal indicative of a spatial distribution of the microbubbles.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.