Patent ID: 7811233

Claim:
A method for reducing speckle in an ultrasound image, comprising the steps of: providing a biological tissue sample; generating a transmit ultrasonic signal at a fundamental frequency; directing the transmit signal into and along a propagation path in the sample, wherein the tissue distorts the transmit signal along the propagation path and thereby produces a distorted ultrasonic signal including a fundamental component at the fundamental frequency and harmonic components at second and higher order harmonic frequencies of the fundamental frequency, and further wherein the sample also reflects the distorted ultrasonic signal including said fundamental and harmonic components; receiving the fundamental component and the harmonic components of the reflected distorted ultrasonic signal; forming an ultrasound image of the biological tissue sample using the sum of the received fundamental component and the harmonic component at the second order harmonic frequency to reduce speckle in the image; and displaying the formed image.