Lewis E Thomas

US Patent:

20060173313, Aug 3, 2006

Filed:

Jan 27, 2005

Appl. No.:

11/046347

Inventors:

D-L Liu - Issaquah WA, US
Lewis Thomas - Palo Alto CA, US
Kutay Ustuner - Mountain View CA, US
Charles Bradley - Burlingame CA, US
John Lazenby - Fall City WA, US

International Classification:

A61B 8/00

US Classification:

600437000

Abstract:

A set of N×M signals are acquired from an object, where N is the number of array elements and M corresponds to variations in data acquisition and/or processing parameters. The parameters include transmit aperture functions, transmit waveforms, receive aperture functions, and receive filtering functions in space and/or time. A coherence factor is computed as a ratio of the energy of the coherent sum to the energy of the at-least-partially incoherent sum of channel or image signals acquired with at least one different parameter. Partial beamformed data may be used for channel coherence calculation. For image domain coherence, a component image is formed for each different transmit beam or receive aperture function, and a coherence factor image is computed using the set of component images. The coherence factor image is displayed or used to modify or blend other images formed of the same region.