Patent ID: 8197412

Claim:
An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus comprising: a transmitting and receiving unit for supplying drive signals to plural ultrasonic transducers to transmit ultrasonic waves to an object to be inspected, and processing reception signals outputted from said plural ultrasonic transducers which have received ultrasonic echoes reflected by the object; a reception control unit for performing focusing processing by matching phases of the reception signals outputted from said transmitting and receiving unit according to plural delay amounts set based on acoustic velocity values within the object to generate a sound ray signal along a reception direction of the ultrasonic echoes; an image generating unit for generating an image signal representing an ultrasonic image based on the sound ray signal generated by said reception control unit; a focusing determining unit for determining a degree of beam focusing in the focusing processing with respect to first regions within the ultrasonic image based on the sound ray signal generated by said reception control unit; and an acoustic velocity value correcting unit for obtaining first acoustic velocity values with respect to the first regions according to a determination result of said focusing determining unit and further obtaining second acoustic velocity values with respect to second regions segmented in smaller regions than the first regions, said acoustic velocity value correcting unit obtaining the second acoustic velocity values with respect to each second region, which is arranged across plural first regions, by performing at least one of interpolating processing and smoothing processing on the first acoustic velocity values, such that said reception control unit regenerates the sound ray signal based on the second acoustic velocity values and said image generating unit regenerates the image signal based on the regenerated sound ray signal.