Patent ID: 7611466

Claim:
A method to measure wall thickness of an organ using an ultrasound transceiver, the method comprising: positioning an ultrasound transceiver exterior to a patient such that at least a portion of an organ wall is within the range of the transceiver; transmitting ultrasound pulses as scanlines to, and receiving those pulses echoed back from, the external and internal surface of the portion of the organ wall, and based on those pulses, forming at least one two-dimensional image; selecting wall loci from the scanlines to define a first position of the organ wall crossing the scanlines from the two dimensional image; adjusting the position of the wall loci by applying a one-dimensional analysis of the pulse echoes associated with the two-dimensional image to a second position and a third position of the organ wall by converting signals of ultrasound echoes associated with the scanlines of the two-dimensional image from a non-rectified signal pattern to a rectified signal pattern is achieved by a Hubert Transform; and determining the thickness of the organ wall by calculating the difference of the wall loci between the second and third positions crossing the scanlines of the two dimensional image, wherein peak maxima of the rectified signal pattern of each scanline of the two-dimensional image determines wall loci candidates for the second and third positions.