Patent ID: 11860273
Assignee: DECISION SCIENCES MEDICAL COMPANY, LLC
Field: Medical technology (Instruments)
Classification: CPC G  A | IPC A  G

Claim 21:
22. A method for spatial and temporal encoding of acoustic waveforms in synthetic aperture acoustic imaging, comprising:
generating a set of spatially and temporally encoded acoustic waveforms for transmission toward a target volume that includes generating one or more of (i) a unique set of coded waveforms, (ii) a transmit delay pattern of time delays for acoustic waveforms to be transmitted at the target volume, or (iii) a transmit amplitude and phase pattern of the acoustic waveforms to be transmitted at the target volume;
coherently transmitting the spatially and temporally encoded acoustic waveforms, toward the target volume, using a spatially-sampled aperture formed on an array of transducer elements for one or more transducer segments of an acoustic probe device, wherein each transducer element used in the transmitting is assigned a first index number 1 to i, wherein i is a number equal to or less than a total number of transducer elements;
receiving returned encoded acoustic waveforms on the spatially-sampled aperture, wherein the transducer elements are assigned a second index number 1 to j, wherein j is a number equal to or less than the total number of transducer elements;
decoding the returned encoded acoustic waveforms to isolate the ith transmission on the jth reception that correspond to a set of image points scattered from the target volume; and
processing the decoded returned encoded acoustic waveforms to beamform isolated echo samples for each image point of the set of image points of the target volume,
wherein each time delay in the transmit delay pattern for the acoustic waveforms to be transmitted is selected from a set of random time delays,
wherein the set of random time delays corresponds to a uniform distribution of random values within a range spanning from zero to a maximum tolerated standoff distance between two or more transducer elements.