Patent ID: 9179889
Filing Date: 2015-11-10
Classification: A61B

Abstract:
1. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus, to which a probe with a transducer is connectible, the apparatus comprising: an ultrasonic signal processing section, which performs transmission processing for transmitting an ultrasonic wave toward a subject's blood vessel by driving the probe and performs reception processing for generating a received signal based on the ultrasonic wave that has been reflected from the subject's blood vessel and received at the probe; a tomographic image processing section, which generates a tomographic image based on the received signal; a boundary detecting section, which detects the lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundaries of the blood vessel based on either the received signal or the tomographic image; a vascular wall thickness calculating section, which calculates, as a vascular wall thickness value, the interval between the lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundaries that have been detected by the boundary detecting section; a vascular center determining section, which determines the probe is located over around a longitudinal center of the blood vessel when it has been detected that a length of a portion of the tomographic image in which a signal intensity or luminance distribution is unique to the lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundaries is longer than a predetermined length; a reliability determining section, which determines reliability of the vascular wall thickness value based on either a signal feature of the received signal or an image information feature of the tomographic image at a location on any of the lumen-intima and media-adventitia boundaries that have been detected and based on a determined result of the vascular center determining section; and a control section, which decides, in accordance with the decision made by the reliability determining section, that the vascular wall thickness value be defined as an intima-media thickness.