According to one embodiment, an ultrasound diagnosis apparatus includes a transmission beam former and a transmitting circuit. The transmission beam former generates a transmission pulse. The transmitting circuit supplies an ultrasound transducer with the transmission pulse received from the transmission beam former as a drive signal. The supply of a clock necessary for the generation of the transmission pulse is stopped during a substantial reception period of echo signals from the ultrasound transducer.

An acoustic imaging probe having an adjustable effective elevation length. The acoustic 5imaging probe has a transducer element, comprising a plurality of acoustic transducers, that is divided into a plurality of sets of adjacent transducers. A processing module controls how many sets contribute to an acoustic pulse emitted by the acoustic transducer element during an imaging process, to thereby adjust an effective elevation length of the acoustic imaging probe.

Various methods and systems are provided for a pulse circuit of a transmitter of an ultrasound system. In one example, the system may include a pulse circuit with transistors driving an ultrasound transducer of the ultrasound system, whereby the switching on and off of the transistors is mediated via one or more dynamic currents flowing from the gates of one or more of the transistors.

A micromachined ultrasonic transducer (MUT) which comprises a first piezoelectric layer and a second piezoelectric layer. The first piezoelectric layer is disposed between a first electrode and a second electrode. The second piezoelectric layer is disposed between the second electrode and a third electrode. At least the first electrode has first and second ends along a first axis, one or more of which is defined by a radius of curvature R. A second axis normal to the first passes through a midpoint of the first axis. A half-width of the first electrode is defined by a length L measured from the midpoint, in the direction of the second axis, to an outer perimeter of the first electrode. A total width of the first electrode at its narrowest point along the first axis is at most 2L such that the first electrode has a concave shape. R/L, is greater than 1.

A graphical user interface displayed by a processing device in operative communication with an ultrasound device may include a preset filter option that provides an easy way to switch between different presets which belong to a preset family. The user uses the preset filter feature to cycle through the different presets in the family while remaining on the same screen that is showing ultrasound images collected in real time. The imaging depth remains the same while the user is using the preset filter feature to select the preset within a family. Other settings such as time-gain compensation may not remain the same when cycling between presets. The preset filter feature allows a user to continuously view and assess the ultrasound images being collected in real time while cycling through the presets in the family.

Circuitry for ultrasound devices is described. A multi-level pulser is described, which can support time-domain and spatial apodization. The multi-level pulser may be controlled through a software-defined waveform generator. In response to the execution of a computer code, the waveform generator may access master segments from a memory, and generate a stream of packets directed to pulsing circuits. The stream of packets may be serialized. A plurality of decoding circuits may modulate the streams of packets to obtain spatial apodization.

An ultrasound system according to the present disclosure may include a beamformer configured to perform per-channel weighting on the RF signals received at each channel in order to reduce noise clutter in the image. For this purpose, the beamformer may receive at one or more channels associated with an active aperture, sets of receive signals associated with respective transmit beams that at least partially overlap. The beamformer may alter the receive space, e.g., to align the sets of receive signals to a common location (e.g., between the transmit beams) and generate a coherence-based weighting value that may be indicative of blockage. The coherence-based weighting value may be applied on a per-channel basis to the receive signals. The beamformer may also communicate the coherence metric to the controller for altering the transmit space. In some such examples, the power output to one or more elements of the array may be adjusted based upon the per-channel weighting value or determined blockage of the aperture.

Ultrasound devices and methods are described, including a repeatable ultrasound transducer probe having ultrasonic transducers and corresponding circuitry. The repeatable ultrasound transducer probe may be used individually or coupled with other instances of the repeatable ultrasound transducer probe to create a desired ultrasound device. The ultrasound devices may optionally be connected to various types of external devices to provide additional processing and image rendering functionality.

Ultrasound devices and methods are described for collecting ultrasound data. An ultrasound device may include an ultrasound transducer array. The ultrasound device may collect ultrasound data along multiple elevational steering angles with respective apertures of different sizes. The ultrasound data may be used to perform a measurement or generate a visualization.

An ultrasonic imaging system can include an ultrasound imaging probe, a computing device, and a link for communicatively coupling the computing device and the ultrasound imaging probe. The probe can include an ultrasonic transducer and preprocessing circuitry. The ultrasonic transducer can produce an electrical signal from an ultrasonic pressure wave and have a transducer element. The preprocessing circuitry can be electrically coupled to the ultrasonic transducer and have a signal converter and a signal integrator. The signal converter can condition a signal from the transducer element and convert the signal to a digital signal. The signal integrator can combine the digital signal into a transmission signal with at least a 10 Gigabit per second data rate. The signal can then be transmitted for processing by the computing device.