The method of the invention determines a physical characteristic on a punctual location inside a medium, and includes including the steps of sending an emitted sequence having emitted pulses that have different amplitudes, receiving a received sequence having received pulses corresponding to echoes of the emitted pulses, calculating a phase difference between the received pulses relative to the emitted pulses, and determining the physical characteristic on the punctual location on the bases of said the phase difference.

Sparkle in color flow imaging is detected. Color flow data is estimated with different pulse repetition frequency (PRF). By correlating the color flow data estimated with different PRFs, sparkle is identified. Color flow images may be filtered to reduce motion while maintaining the sparkle region (e.g., kidney stone imaging) or reduce the sparkle region while maintaining motion (e.g., remove sparkle as system noise).

The present invention is capable of determining the location(s) of waste (e.g. nuclear fuel debris, obstacles, contaminated or otherwise radioactive materials), monitoring and inspecting their surroundings, and transporting them, as well as use in repair, construction, and reactor decommissioning work in high radiation environment. Ultrasound (or sound) waves are not subject to interference from radiation. This modality is utilized in the present invention to detect and image waste and/or objects of interest. The system combines the resulting ultrasound (or sound) wave images for detecting waste and/or objects of interest with radiation information acquired by a radiation detector, to generate and adjust new composite images to display. For example, the image in the direction of strong radiation is red and the image in the direction of weak radiation is blue. Additionally, the constituent imaging apparatus may be fitted on a drone or robotic system for repair and construction work.

An ultrasound imaging system has an improved dynamic range control which enables a user to reduce image haze with substantially no effect on bright tissue in the image and without increasing speckle variance. A dynamic range processor processes an input image to produce an approximation image which is a spatially low pass filtered version of the input image. The dynamic range of the approximation image is compressed, and image detail, unaffected by the compression, is added back to produce a dynamically compressed image for display.

The ultrasound imaging apparatus provided to quantify the degree of flash artifacts based on an ultrasound echo signal, and to notify a user of an image section with a severe flash artifact includes: a probe configured to irradiate an ultrasound signal to an object and receive an ultrasound echo signal reflected from the object; an image processor configured to obtain a color Doppler signal from which the clutter signal is removed by filtering the ultrasound echo signal, obtain a plurality of consecutive Doppler image frames based on the color Doppler signal and generate a Doppler image based on the plurality of Doppler image frames; a display configured to output the Doppler image; and a controller configured to calculate a flash artifact score of each of the plurality of Doppler image frames based on the ultrasound echo signal, generate a time line corresponding to the plurality of Doppler image frames and control the display so that flash artifact scores of each of the plurality of Doppler image frames appear on the timeline.

In an ultrasound imaging system which produces synthetically transmit focused images, the multiline signals used to form image scanlines are analyzed for speed of sound variation, and a map 60 of this variation is generated. In a preferred implementation, the phase discrepancy of the received multilines caused by speed of sound variation in the medium is estimated in the angular spectrum domain for the receive angular spectrum. Once the phase is estimated for all locations in an image, the differential phase between two points at the same lateral location, but different depth, is computed. This differential phase is proportional to the local speed of sound between the two points. A color-coded two- or three-dimensional map 60 is produced from these speed of sound estimates and presented to the user.

Techniques, systems, and devices are disclosed for ultrasound diagnostics using spread spectrum, coherent, frequency- and/or phase-coded waveforms. In one aspect, a method includes synthesizing individual orthogonal coded waveforms to form a composite waveform for transmission toward a biological material of interest, in which the synthesized individual orthogonal coded waveforms correspond to distinct frequency bands and include one or both of frequency-coded or phase-coded waveforms; transmitting a composite acoustic waveform toward the biological material of interest, where the transmitting includes transducing the individual orthogonal coded waveforms into corresponding acoustic waveforms to form the composite acoustic waveform; receiving acoustic waveforms returned from at least part of the biological material of interest corresponding to at least some of the transmitted acoustic waveforms that form the composite acoustic waveform; and processing the received returned acoustic waveforms to produce an image of at least part of the biological material of interest.

An intravascular ultrasound imaging system comprises a catheter having an elongated body having a distal end and an imaging core arranged to be inserted into the elongated body. The imaging core is arranged to transmit ultrasonic energy pulses and to receive reflected ultrasonic energy pulses. The system further includes an imaging engine coupled to the imaging core and arranged to provide the imaging core with energy pulses to cause the imaging core to transmit the ultrasonic energy pulses. The energy pulses are arranged in repeated sequences and the energy pulses of each sequence have varying characteristics. The reflected pulses may be processed to provide a composite image of images resulting from each different characteristic.

According to one embodiment, a medical diagnostic apparatus includes processing circuitry and display circuitry. The processing circuitry estimates a position of a structure in a subject based on data obtained by scanning with respect to the subject and analyzes tissue characterization in the subject. The display circuitry displays an analysis result of the tissue characterization obtained by the processing circuitry with respect to a plurality of positions in the subject except for the estimated structure position.

An ultrasound imaging apparatus includes a processor including hardware. The processor is configured to: generating first frequency spectrum data and second frequency spectrum data with regard to a first ultrasound signal and a second ultrasound signal, respectively; generating first ultrasound image data based on the first ultrasound signal; generating second ultrasound image data based on the second ultrasound signal; estimating a displacement amount including at least one of a positional change amount and a rotation angle of a subject depicted in the first ultrasound image data with respect to the subject depicted in the second ultrasound image data; correcting the first frequency spectrum data in accordance with the estimated displacement amount; calculating differential feature data by using the corrected first frequency spectrum data and the second frequency spectrum data; and generating analysis image data to which color information corresponding to the differential feature data is applied.