Patent ID: 9629605
Date: 2017-04-25
CPC Classifications: A61B,G01S

Claim:
1. An ultrasound system, comprising: a probe configured to transmit ultrasound signals to a target object and receive ultrasound echo signals reflected from the target object to thereby obtain first and second receive signals, the first receive signal being obtained before applying a stress to the target object and the second receive signal being obtained after applying a stress to the target object; a processor configured to compute strains by using first ultrasound data formed based on the first receive signal and second ultrasound data formed based on the second receive signal and configured to form a histogram of the computed strains; a user interface, coupled to the processor, configured to receive a user input for selecting a number n which is an integer equal to or greater than 2, the number n indicating into how many histogram clusters the histogram is to be divided, the number n being selected according to a type of the target object; and a display coupled to the processor, wherein the processor is further configured to compute mean and standard deviation of the computed strains and a maximum value as a result of an operation of (mean−2×standard deviation) and a minimum value as a result of an operation of (mean+2×standard deviation), wherein the processor is further configured to normalize the computed strains by mapping the strains to values ranging from 0 to 255, the strains equal to or lower than the minimum value being mapped to 0 and the strains equal to or higher than the maximum value being mapped to 255, wherein the processor automatically determines n−1 threshold values between 0 and 255 which separate the histogram into n histogram clusters by using an Otsu algorithm less than n times, the n−1 threshold strain values including a first threshold strain value, the n histogram clusters including a first histogram cluster of the histogram of the computed strains between a first lower limit of strain value and a first upper limit of strain value that are below the first threshold strain value, and a second histogram cluster of the histogram of the computed strains between a second lower limit of strain value and a second upper limit of strain value that are above the first threshold strain value, forms a color map for strain-to-color mapping of the strains, the color map including n color map regions respectively corresponding to the n histogram clusters including the first histogram cluster and the second histogram cluster, wherein the number of the plurality of color map regions equals to the number of the plurality of histogram clusters, and independently maps colors at each of the color map regions to the strains, wherein the display is configured to display the color map.