Techniques, systems, and devices are disclosed for synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging using a beamformer that incorporates a model of the object. In some aspects, a system includes an array of transducers to transmit and/or receive acoustic signals at an object that forms a synthetic aperture of the system with the object, an object beamformer unit to (i) beamform the object coherently as a function of position, orientation, and/or geometry of the transducers with respect to a model of the object, and (ii) produce a beamformed output signal including spatial information about the object derived from beamforming the acoustic echoes; a data processing unit to process data and produce an image of the object based on a rendition of the position, the orientation, the geometry, and/or the surface properties of the object, relative to the coordinate system of the array, as determined by the data processing unit.

A catheter-based ultrasound imaging system configured to provide a full circumferential 360-degree view around an intra-vascular/intra-cardiac imaging-catheter-head by generating a three-dimensional view of the tissue surrounding the imaging-head over time. The ultrasound imaging system can also provide tissue-state mapping capability. The evaluation of the vasculature and tissue characteristics include path and depth of lesions during cardiac-interventions such as ablation. The ultrasound imaging system comprises a catheter with a static or rotating sensor array tip supporting continuous circumferential rotation around its axis, connected to an ultrasound module and respective processing machinery allowing ultrafast imaging and a rotary motor that translates radial movements around a longitudinal catheter axis through a rotary torque transmitting part to rotate the sensor array-tip. This allows the capture and reconstruction of information of the vasculature including tissue structure around the catheter tip for generation of the three-dimensional view over time.

Vector Doppler Imaging (VDI) improves on conventional Color Doppler Imaging (CDI) by giving speed and direction of blood flow at each pixel of a display generated by a computing system. Multiple angles of Plane wave transmissions (PWT) via an ultrasound transducer conveniently give projected Doppler measurements over a wide field of view, providing enough angular diversity to identify velocity vectors in a short time window while capturing transitory flow dynamics. A fast, aliasing-resistant velocity vector estimator for PWT is presented, and VDI imaging of a carotid artery with a 5 MHz linear array is shown using a novel synthetic particle flow visualization method.

To implement a single-chip ultrasonic imaging solution, on-chip signal processing may be employed in the receive signal path to reduce data bandwidth and a high-speed serial data module may be used to move data for all received channels off-chip as digital data stream. The digitization of received signals on-chip allows advanced digital signal processing to be performed on-chip, and thus permits the full integration of an entire ultrasonic imaging system on a single semiconductor substrate. Various novel waveform generation techniques, transducer configuration and biasing methodologies, etc., are likewise disclosed. HIFU methods may additionally or alternatively be employed as a component of the “ultrasound-on-a-chip” solution disclosed herein.

Described here are systems and methods for imaging blood flow in a subject's vasculature, which may include small blood vessels, using ultrasound without the need for a contrast agent. A locally implemented low-rank matrix decomposition is used together with adaptive cutoff values to provide noninvasive ultrasound blood flow imaging capable of imaging the subject's vasculature with very high spatial and temporal resolution, and without the administration of contrast agents such as microbubble contrast agents. Thus, in some instances the systems and methods can be used to image blood flow in small vessels and tissue microvasculature with high spatial and temporal resolution.

Provided are an ultrasonic imaging method and device, and a storage medium. The ultrasonic imaging method includes: acquiring an ultrasonic echo signal; segmenting the ultrasonic echo signal into a first predetermined number of sub-echo signals according to scan depths; performing amplitude apodization on each sub-echo signal with a predetermined window function to obtain processed sub-echo signals; completing ultrasonic imaging according to the processed sub-echo signals. At least one sub-echo signal is subjected to the follow processing: segmenting the at least one sub-echo signal into a second predetermined number of unit echo signals according to the scan depths, and assigning a weighting coefficient to each unit echo signal; performing amplitude apodization on each unit echo signal with the corresponding predetermined window function, and weighting the unit echo signals with corresponding weighting coefficients to obtain processed unit echo signals; and forming a processed sub-echo signal from the processed unit echo signals.

An information processing apparatus includes an image data acquisition unit and a template data acquisition unit. The image data acquisition unit acquires a plurality of pieces of image data generated by performing a plurality of ultrasonic wave transmission and reception operations on a subject while changing an ultrasonic wave transmission and reception mode. The template data acquisition unit acquires a plurality of pieces of template data corresponding to the plurality of ultrasonic wave transmission and reception operations, respectively. The similarity information acquisition unit acquires information indicating a similarity between an image value sequence of the plurality of pieces of image data at a target position and a template data sequence of the plurality of pieces of template data at the target position.

An ultrasound system according to some embodiments may include an ultrasound transducer configured to transmit ultrasound pulses toward tissue and generate echo signals responsive to the ultrasound pulses, a channel memory configured to store the echo signals, a beamformer configured to generated beamformed signals responsive to the echo signals, a neural network configured to receive one or more samples of the echo signals or the beamformed signals and produce a first type of ultrasound imaging data, and a processor configured to generate a second type of ultrasound imaging data, wherein the one or more processors may be further configured to generate an ultrasound image based on the first type of ultrasound imaging data and the second type of ultrasound imaging data and to cause a display communicatively coupled therewith to display the ultrasound image.

Ultrasound imaging at high spatial resolution that makes use of both magnitude and phase of echoes in an image reconstruction process that applies unique constraints to a fitting of echoes from the object of interest to echoes from an array of known scatterers.

An ultrasound imaging system (100) includes a 2-D transducer array (102) with a first 1-D array (104, 204) of one or more rows of transducing elements (106, 204.sub.1, . . . 204.sub.6) configured to produce first ultrasound data and a second 1-D array (104, 206) of one or more columns of transducing elements (106, 206.sub.1, . . . 206.sub.6) configured to produce second ultrasound data. The first and second 1-D arrays are configured for row-column addressing. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a controller (112) configured to control transmission and reception of the first and second 1-D arrays, and a beamformer (114) configured to beamform the received first and second echoes to produce ultrasound data, and an image processor (116) configured to process the ultrasound data to generate an image, which is displayed via a display (224).