Patent ID: 9265484
Filing Date: 2016-02-23
CPC Classification: A61B,G01S

Claim Text:
1. A method of defining and displaying an M-mode path for display in an ultrasound imaging system, the method comprising: transmitting a first unfocused ultrasound signal from a single transmitting transducer element into a region of interest including a structure of interest; receiving echoes of the first unfocused ultrasound signal with a first group of receiving transducer elements; receiving echoes of the first unfocused ultrasound signal with a second group of receiving transducer elements; retrieving position data describing an acoustic position of the single transmitting transducer element, each element of the first group of receiving transducer elements, and each element of the second group of receiving transducer elements; forming a first image by using the position data to calculate reflector positions for the echoes received with each of the elements of the first group of receiving transducer elements and coherently combining echo data received by the elements of the first group of receiving transducer elements; forming a second image by using the position data to calculate reflector positions for the echoes received with each of the elements of the second group of receiving transducer elements and coherently combining echo data received by the elements of the second group of receiving transducer elements; producing an improved-quality image of the region of interest from the received echoes by incoherently combining the first image and the second image; displaying the improved-quality image of the region of interest including the structure of interest to a user; defining an arbitrary one-pixel-wide path through the structure of interest; and displaying a graph of a magnitude of pixels along the path over time.