Patent ID: 7586813

Claim:
A signal processing apparatus for an ultrasound transducer, comprising: a first preamplifier for amplifying an analog signal produced by an ultrasound transducer to generate an amplified analog signal; a first analog-to-digital converter directly connected to the preamplifier for producing a sequence of first digital signals from the amplified analog signal; and a median filter for filtering the sequence of first digital signals, each of said first digital signals having a respective row of values in which each subsequent value in the row represents the value of the signal at the next sampling point of m sampling points that are recorded in a sampling window for each first digital signal, said first analog-to-digital converter being connected to a first median filter for filtering the sequence of first digital signals recorded in n sampling windows to produce a sequence of first filtered digital signals, said median filter being adapted to transfer a sequence of n rows having m values in each row to respective columns in an input matrix, sort the values in each row of the input matrix by size and output the value in each respective row that has the median size in the respective row of the input matrix to a result array, the values output to the result array providing a first median digital signal used to produce an output signal for the ultrasound transducer.