Patent ID: 9629613
Date: 2017-04-25
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01S,G10K

Claim:
1. A beamforming method comprising: radiating a target object with ultrasonic waves and receiving a plurality of ultrasonic signals reflected from the target object by a total number M of transducers, the total number M being a natural number; acquiring first beamforming computation results for a first group of ultrasonic signals, among the received plurality of ultrasonic signals, wherein a number n of ultrasonic signals included into the first group is smaller than M; determining a beamforming coefficient candidate group based on the first beamforming computation results; acquiring second beamforming computation results for all or some of the received plurality of ultrasonic signals by applying beamforming coefficients of the beamforming coefficient candidate group; selecting a final beamforming coefficient from the beamforming coefficients of the beamforming coefficient candidate group based on the second beamforming computation results; and beamforming the received plurality of ultrasonic signals using the selected final beamforming coefficient as a weight.