Patent ID: 9316725
Filing Date: 2016-04-19
CPC Classification: G01S

Claim Text:
1. An ultrasound diagnostic apparatus comprising: an ultrasound probe configured to transmit toward and receive ultrasound signals from a three-dimensional region of a subject over a plurality of slices having different slice directions; a transmitting and receiving unit having a beamformer configured to acquire ultrasound data by a plurality of executions of multibeam forming using the beamformer, the ultrasound data comprising a plurality of sets of ultrasound data along a plurality of directions by a one-time transmitting and receiving operation of the ultrasound probe for each of the plurality of slices; processing circuitry having a data storage to store said ultrasound data, configured to: generate a plurality of sets of synthesized ultrasound data using the ultrasound data acquired during each of said executions, each of the sets of synthesized ultrasound data being acquired along a respective plurality of different receiving directions with respect to a transmitting direction over at least two of the slices, and generate image data on the basis of the synthesized ultrasound data; wherein the transmitting and receiving unit executes a plurality of scans along a scan direction which is essentially perpendicular to a direction of ultrasound transmitting, the scans being performed in different slice directions which are essentially perpendicular to the scan direction; the processing circuitry is configured to synthesize sets of ultrasound data relating to different scans and generate the synthesized ultrasound data, the transmitting and receiving unit scans a first slice by repeating four-beam multibeam forming having a predetermined spread along the scan direction and to scan a second slice by repeating said four-beam multibeam forming, the scan of said second slice being started from a scan position located one half of the predetermined spread from a start position of the scan of the first slice; and the processing circuitry is configured to synthesize 2 sets of ultrasound data for the multibeam forming of the first slice and synthesize 2 sets of ultrasound data for the multibeam forming of the second slice, the 2 sets of ultrasound data corresponding to the second slice relating to directions having essentially a same scan direction component as directions relating to the 2 sets of ultrasound data corresponding to the first slice.