Patent ID: 7238157

Claim:
A method of probing a material under investigation comprising the steps of: transmitting one or more ultrasound beam into the material under investigation; receiving first echoes generated by interactions between one of the transmitted one or more ultrasound beam and the material under investigation, the interactions occurring at points distributed over at least a first spatial dimension and a second spatial dimension; generating first data from the received first echoes, the first data having values distributed in a time dimension and additionally distributed over at least the first or the second spatial dimension; transforming the first data into second data having values distributed over at least both the first and the second spatial dimension; transmitting an other ultrasound beam into the material under investigation; receiving further echoes generated using the other ultrasound beam; generating third data using the received further echoes, the third data being echolocation data and having a dimensionality; and combining the third data with the second data, the combination having the same dimensionality as the third data.