Patent ID: 7273455

Claim:
A method for corrections of wavefront aberrations in a received signal for ultrasound imaging in tissue, using an ultrasound transducer array with a two-dimensional distribution of elements, the elements having a surface dimension that is shorter than a correlation length of the wave front aberrations of the received signal across said array surface, comprising the steps of: connecting the elements to a transmit and a receive beam former where homogeneous delay and amplitude corrections of signals from the elements for direction steering and focusing of the transmit and receive beams are done based on an assumption of a constant propagation velocity in the tissue; filtering the element signals, when in receive mode, in receive aberration correction filters before being added to the final, corrected receive beam former output signal; filtering the element signals; when in transmit mode, in transmit correction filters to form aberration corrected element pulses that are transmitted; and estimating correction filter characteristics for each element for at least one frequency from corresponding components of at least one eigenvector of a correlation matrix of the received element signals at said frequency.