Patent ID: 8177718

Claim:
An ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system for imaging a volumetric region with a sequence of translated receive apertures comprising: an array of transducer elements, located in an ultrasound probe, local groups of which can comprise patches of elements having one or more sizes; a multi-channel beamformer, located in a system mainframe, and producing a beamformed output signal from summed partial sum signals; a microbeamformer including a plurality of delay lines, located in the ultrasound probe and coupled to elements of the patches, each delay line having an input coupled to an array element and an output producing a delayed signal which is summed with other delayed signals in the microbeamformer to produce a partial sum signal which is directed to a selected one of a plurality of channels of the multi-channel beamformer; and a source of control signals, coupled to the probe microbeamformer, which act to control the direction of delay line outputs to channels of the mainframe multi-channel beamformer, wherein a receive aperture formed by the elements of multiple patches may be stepped from one aperture location of the transducer array for one beam to another aperture location of the transducer array for another beam while maintaining the same patch size or sizes.