Patent ID: 7695438

Claim:
A beamformer system for minimizing acoustic disruption in ultrasound imaging, the system comprising: a transmit beamformer configured to sequentially generate a first transmission and a second transmission of acoustic energy in response to a first delay pattern and a second delay pattern, respectively, the first delay pattern corresponding to minimizing acoustic energy in a region of interest, and the second delay pattern corresponding to focusing acoustic energy along a scan direction within the region of interest, the second transmission occurring within an amount of time after the first transmission, the amount of time insufficient to allow echoes of the first transmission from locations in the region of interest to die out, the first transmission configuring transmitters of the transmit beamformer at start positions for the second transmission; a receive beamformer configured to receive echo signals in response to the second transmission and substantially not receive echo signals in response to the first transmission; wherein the transmit beamformer is configured to generate a third transmission, and where the receive beamformer is configured to isolate information in response to a combination of echo signals received in response to the second transmission and the third transmission as a function of a relative polarity between waveforms of the second and third transmissions.