Among the various aspects of the present disclosure is the provision of systems and methods of cross-ray ultrasound tomography.

The present invention aims to obtain and provide one or more types of information desired by an operator with a high efficiency. From a probe that transmits an ultrasonic wave to a subject and receives the ultrasonic wave coming from the subject due to the transmission, a reception signal is received and the reception signal is processed. Accordingly, a movement vector indicating a movement amount and a movement direction is calculated and a movement vector distribution is determined for a plurality of points set at least two-dimensionally in the subject. A distribution of one or more desired movement vector components is extracted from the movement vector distribution.

Embodiments of the present disclosure provide a flow imaging processing method, which may include determining flow imaging parameters, where the flow imaging parameters include a sound speed for calculation, a center frequency of the transmitting pulse for exciting a probe and a imaging depth; obtaining a velocity measurement range; and determining the first target number of the different transmit angles according to the sound speed for calculation, the center frequency of the transmitting pulse, the imaging depth and the velocity measurement range. The embodiments of the present disclosure also provide an ultrasound imaging device.

Provided are an ultrasonic signal processing device that can evaluate reliability of a velocity vector calculated by sub-pixel tracking, an ultrasonic diagnosis apparatus, and an ultrasonic signal arithmetic processing method. The ultrasonic signal processing device includes an echo signal acquisition unit that acquires an echo signal reflected by an object to be inspected, a velocity vector calculation unit that calculates a velocity vector using the echo signal, a post-parallel-movement signal generation unit that generates a post-parallel-movement signal obtained by approximately parallelly moving the echo signal, an image deformation component extraction unit that extracts an image deformation component which is a change component of a signal value due to deformation of an image from a deviation between the post-parallel-movement signal and the echo signal, and an error energy calculation unit that calculates an error energy of the velocity vector from the image deformation component.

An ultrasound imaging system (100) includes a transducer array (102). The transducer array includes a first set of transducer elements (206 or 208, 302 or 304) and a second set of transducer elements (208 or 206, 304 or 302). The first and second sets of transducer elements includes long axes and are angularly offset from each other by a non-zero angle with respect to the long axes. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a velocity processor (120) that processes echoes received by the first and second sets of transducer elements and determines an axial and two transverse flow velocity components based on the received echoes.

To uniformly extract a secondary flow based on quantitative calculation even in a complicated blood flow in a heart chamber or a blood vessel. There is provided a secondary flow detection device, including: a degree-of-swirl map calculation unit that obtains a velocity vector map calculated based on an echo signal reflected by an inspection target, calculates, as a value indicating a degree of a spatial change of a velocity vector, a degree of swirl based on the velocity vector map, and calculates, as a degree-of-swirl map, a spatial distribution of an iso-degree-of-swirl line obtained by connecting the degree of swirl of an equal value; a secondary flow candidate extraction unit that extracts, as a secondary flow candidate, an iso-degree-of-swirl line satisfying a predetermined condition among the iso-degree-of-swirl line indicated in the degree-of-swirl map; a feature amount calculation unit that calculates a feature amount of the velocity vector inside the secondary flow candidate; a secondary flow determination unit that determines whether the secondary flow candidate is a desired secondary flow based on the feature amount; and a secondary flow extraction unit that extracts and outputs the secondary flow determined by the secondary flow determination unit.

An ultrasound imaging system (100) includes a velocity processor (118) that processes ultrasound data representing structure flowing through a tubular object and generates vector flow imaging information indicative of the structure flowing through a tubular object based thereon. The vector flow imaging information includes an axial velocity component signal and a lateral component signal, and the axial and lateral component signals indicate a direction and a speed of the structure flowing through the tubular object. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a flow parameter processor (120) that determines at least one flow parameter based on the vector flow imaging information and generates a signal indicative thereof.

An ultrasound imaging system includes a transducer array (202) with a plurality of transducer elements (206) configured to transmit a pulsed field beam into a scan field of view, receive echo signals produced in response to the pulsed field interacting with particles/structure flowing/moving in the scan field of view, and generate electrical signals indicative of the echo signals. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a beamformer (212) including multiple synthetic transmit aperture beamformers configured to process the electrical signals over a plurality of processing channels (312) into corresponding receive-beams of RF-data with a beam-level delay, channel-level delays, a beam-level gain and channel-level gains. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a velocity processor (216) configured to estimate a flow velocity of the structure flowing in the scan field of view from the RF-data. The ultrasound imaging system further includes a rendering engine (224) configured to display the flow velocity estimate on a display (226) with color-coding.

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).

A system (800) includes an acquisition engine (837) that acquires ultrasound data for two or more modes with a first acquisition algorithm, including an image mode and a special mode. A rendering engine (834) employs a first rendering algorithm and displays the image in a main display window (902) and the special mode ultrasound data in a viewport (906) superimposed over the main display window. The acquisition engine acquires ultrasound data for the special mode using a second acquisition algorithm and the rendering engine displays a first portion of the generated special mode ultrasound data over the main display window and a second portion of the generated special mode ultrasound data over the viewport using a second rendering algorithm in response to the system receiving an input signal indicative of a movement of the viewport from a first location of the main display window to a second different position of the main display window.