Patent ID: 9022937
Filing Date: 2015-05-05
Classification: A61B,G03B,G10K

Abstract:
1. A method for real-time computation of point-by-point apodization coefficients used for beam-forming during ultrasound imaging, comprising: obtaining ultrasonic pulses by transmitting and receiving via a probe; assigning weights to received echo waves to compute an apodization coefficient on each different channel by a computer; storing apodization coefficients of receiving focus points in a memory; computing at least one of an included angle formed by a vector from a transducer element to a first receiving focus point and a normal vector of the transducer element, and a trigonometric function value of the included angle using the computer; and reading the apodization coefficients by using at least one of a quantization of the included angle, and the trigonometric function value as a target memory address to access a location in the memory indexed by the target memory address; for each of a plurality of receiving channels, computing apodization coefficients of a second receiving focus point as a starting point for a subsequent interpolation operation and a third receiving focus point as an ending point for the interpolation operation; and deriving apodization coefficients of the points situated between the second receiving focus point and the third receiving focus point through the interpolation operation; wherein an apodization coefficient Apod is computed using the following expression: in which, Δ=Apod(j, i+N)−Apod(j, i), j stands for a serial number of the receiving transducer elements, m is the i th receiving focus point to the (i+N−1) th receiving focus point, and N is the number of the apodization coefficients between the interpolation starting point and the interpolation ending point.