Patent ID: 11953593
Assignee: COVIDIEN LP
Field: Medical technology (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G  A | IPC A  G

Claim 4:
5. An ultrasound system comprising:
a transducer configured to, for each of a plurality of steer angles, including a reference steer angle:
transmit acoustic energy to a target region at a particular steer angle;
receive acoustic reflections; and
convert the acoustic reflections to Radio Frequency (RF) data;

a front-end circuitry configured, for each of the plurality of steer angles, to process the RF data associated with the particular steer angle to generate an image of the target region;
one or more processors; and
one or more processor-readable storage media storing instructions which, when executed by the one or more processors, cause performance of:
computing a difference between each pixel coordinate of the image generated for the reference steer angle and each corresponding pixel coordinate of the images generated for the steer angles other than the reference steer angle;
generating a difference image based on the computed difference;
generating, for each pixel coordinate of each image generated for the steer angles other than the reference steer angle, motion information of the target region based on the difference image;

for each image generated for the steer angles other than the reference steer angle, generating a weighted image by assigning a weight to each pixel coordinate of the image;
for each weighted image, excluding each pixel coordinate from the weighted image whose motion information exceeds a predetermined threshold without discarding the weighted image;
combining the weighted images to generate an initial compounded ultrasound image of the target region; and
replacing a previous ultrasound image generated for a first steer angle of the plurality of steer angles with a subsequent ultrasound image generated corresponding to the first steer angle to compound and update the initial compounded ultrasound image such that a first latency for generating and displaying the initial compounded ultrasound image includes a plurality of beamforming periods and a second latency for generating and displaying another compounded ultrasound image subsequent to the initial compounded ultrasound image is reduced to one beamforming period.