Patent ID: 7628755

Claim:
An apparatus for processing an ultrasound image of a target object including a periodically moving object, comprising: a pre-processing unit configured to cut ultrasound volume data acquired from a target object in a predetermined direction to obtain a cutting plane image, said ultrasound volume data being constructed with frames; an ROI setting unit configured to perform horizontal projection upon the cutting plane image to determine boundaries of regions of interest (ROIs) and setting ROIs to each of the frames based on the boundaries of ROIs; a VOI setting unit configured to select a predetermined number of first reference frames from the ultrasound volume data by using standard deviation of brightness of vertical lines in the cutting plane image and set a predetermined number of volumes of interest (VOIs) by combining ROIs of the first reference frames with ROIs of frames adjacent to the reference frames; a motion compensating unit configured to process the VOIs to compensate a motion of the target object; a correlation coefficient curve calculating unit configured to calculate a correlation coefficient curve for a predetermined interval at each VOI; a period setting unit configured to set a moving period of the moving object based on the correlation coefficient curve in the volume data; and an ultrasound volume data reconstructing unit configured to reconstruct the ultrasound volume data based on the moving period.