A portable ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus and a method of controlling the same are provided, including a flexible display and a controller which changes a layout of an image displayed on the flexible display. An image necessary for diagnosing an object is appropriately disposed on a flexible display according to a situation, and thus, the user can intuitively determine an ultrasonic image.

A highly portable ultrasound system is configured using a wireless ultrasound probe (10), a processor dongle (30) containing a radio and a digital processor running an operating system and an ultrasound control program, and any conveniently available television receiver or display monitor. The sonographer only needs to carry the small wireless probe and the thumbdrive-like dongle in order to turn any available display device, together with the two components carried by the sonographer, into a completely functional ultrasound system. The sonographer can enter a patient's hospital room, plug the processor dongle into the patient monitor in the room, and conduct an ultrasound exam using the patient monitor as the system display, for instance. The system can be controlled by a touchscreen tablet computer, a wireless mouse, or by distinct gestures made by the probe.

Aspects of the technology described herein relate to control circuitry configured to turn on and off the ADC driver. In some embodiments, the control circuitry is configured to turn on and off the ADC driver in synchronization with sampling activity of an ADC, in particular based on when an ADC is sampling. The control circuitry may be configured to turn on the ADC driver during the hold phase of the ADC a time period before the track phase and to turn off the ADC driver during the hold phase a time period after the track phase. In some embodiments, the control circuitry is configured to control a duty cycle of the ADC driver turning on and off. In some embodiments, the control circuitry is configured to control a ratio between an off current and an on current in the ADC driver.

A hand-held ultrasound system includes integrated electronics within an ergonomic housing. The electronics includes control circuitry, beamforming and circuitry transducer drive circuitry. The electronics communicate with a host computer using an industry standard high speed serial bus. The ultrasonic imaging system is operable on a standard, commercially available, user computing device without specific hardware modifications, and is adapted to interface with an external application without modification to the ultrasonic imaging system to allow a user to gather ultrasonic data on a standard user computing device such as a PC, and employ the data so gathered via an independent external application without requiring a custom system, expensive hardware modifications, or system rebuilds. An integrated interface program allows such ultrasonic data to be invoked by a variety of such external applications having access to the integrated interface program via a standard, predetermined platform such as visual basic or c++.

Multifunctional ultrasound systems and methods for body section registration and mapping of microbubble dynamics. A system is provided that includes one or more micromachined ultrasonic transducer arrays (MUTAs) configured to capture a high-resolution image of at least a portion of a body section using ultrasound and monitor microbubble activity during ultrasound treatment. The system includes an image registration module configured to spatially register the high-resolution image with a reference image. The system includes electronics configured to control one or more of drive signal amplitude, frequency filtering, multiplexing, and DC bias voltage. The system can be configured to control ultrasound treatment based on the monitoring of the microbubble activity during treatment.

Methods and systems for ultrasound imaging and beamforming with a matrix array of transducer elements are provided. Receive signals of each transducer array element are amplified. The amplified receive signal of each transducer array element is digitized. A delay and weight are applied on the amplified and digitized receive signals. The amplified, digitized, delayed, and weighted receive signals are summed across all transducer elements of the matrix array to form a dynamically focused receive beam. An application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that is integrated with the matrix array of transducer elements performs such steps.

Provided is an ultrasound system including an ultrasound probe and an image display device. The ultrasound probe includes: a transducer array, a transmitting and receiving unit that generates a sound ray signal on the basis of a reception signal from the transducer array; an image information data generation unit that generates image information data from the sound ray signal; and a probe-side wireless communication unit that transmits the image information data to the image display device. The image display device includes: an operating state acquisition unit that acquires an operating state of the image display device; and a display-device-side wireless communication unit that transmits the operating state to the ultrasound probe. The ultrasound probe includes at least one of an ultrasound transmission and reception control unit that controls transmission and reception of the ultrasonic waves on the basis of the operating state of the image display device or an output format setting unit that sets an output format of the image information data on the basis of the operating state of the image display device.

Described herein are methods and systems for testing transducers and associated integrated circuits. In some cases, a method or system described herein can comprise modulating a bias voltage using a test signal in order to produce a modulated bias voltage signal useful in testing a plurality of transducers of a transducer array in parallel.

Ultrasound apparatus and methods of processing signals are described. The ultrasound apparatus may include multiple channels. In some embodiments, signal processing techniques are described, which in some embodiments are performed on a per-channel basis. The signal processing techniques may involve using down-conversion and filtering of signals on multiple channels. The down-conversion and filtering may be done prior to beamforming.

A handheld ultrasound device may comprise components configured to provide decreased size, weight, complexity, and power consumption. The handheld ultrasound device may comprise a beamformer configured to implement and compress a flag table in place of a delay table. These improvements can decrease the amount of memory used to generate ultrasound images, which can decrease the size, weight, and power consumption of the handheld ultrasound device. Ultrasound image data on a handheld imaging probe can be compressed on the handheld imaging probe prior to transmission from the probe in order to decrease the amount of data transmitted from the probe. The compressed data may comprise compressed pixels to maintain spatial image resolution. The compression circuitry may comprise an amount of memory related to a dynamic range of the compressed data that is independent of the dynamic range of the input data, which can decrease memory, power consumption, and latencies.