Patent ID: 7393324

Claim:
An ultrasonic transmitting and receiving apparatus comprising: an ultrasonic probe including ultrasonic transducers for transmitting ultrasonic waves to an object to be inspected according to plural drive signals and receiving ultrasonic echoes reflected from the object to output plural reception signals, respectively; drive signal generating means for generating plural drive signals for simultaneously transmitting plural ultrasonic beams from said ultrasonic probe in plural directions, said plural ultrasonic beams corresponding to plural spread spectrum signals having different sets of comb teeth obtained by adding frequency components, which have been discretely selected from among a predetermined number of frequency components having different center frequencies in a transmission band, to each other at a predetermined rate; and reception side signal processing means for performing signal processing on the plural reception signals respectively outputted from said plural ultrasonic transducers, performing phase matching and addition on the plural reception signals subjected to the signal processing so as to form plural reception focal points corresponding to a number of ultrasonic beams transmitted from said ultrasonic probe and thereby obtain sound ray signals, performing filter processing and interpolation processing on each of the sound ray signals to obtain said predetermined number of frequency components in which lacking information has been restored, and performing pulse compression processing by providing different delay amounts to said predetermined number of frequency components and adding said predetermined number of frequency components to each other at a predetermined rate.