An apparatus includes a processor and a display. The processor includes a combiner configured to combine contrast data acquired with a same sub-aperture, for each of a plurality of sub-apertures, to create a contrast frame for each of the sub-apertures. The processor includes a microbubble detector configured to determine positions of microbubbles in the contrast frames. The processor includes a motion estimator configured to estimate a motion field based on frames of B-mode data for each of the plurality of sub-apertures. The processor includes a motion corrector configured to motion correct the positions of the microbubbles in the contrast frames based on the motion field and time delays between emissions for the sets of contrast data and the emission for B-mode data, for each of the plurality of sub-apertures, to produce motion corrected contrast frames. The display is configured to display the motion corrected contrast frames as super resolution images.

A measurement and imaging instrument capable of beamforming with high speed and high accuracy without approximate calculation. The instrument includes a reception unit which receives a wave arriving from a measurement object to generate a reception signal; and an instrument main body which performs a lateral modulation while superposing two waves in a two-dimensional case and three or four waves in a three-dimensional case in beamforming processing of the reception signal in which at least one wave arriving from the measurement object is processed as being transmitted or received in the axial direction or directions symmetric with respect to the axial direction to generate a multi-dimensional reception signal, performs Hilbert transform with respect to the multi-dimensional reception signal, and performs partial derivative processing or one-dimensional Fourier transform to generate analytic signals of the multi-dimensional reception signals of the two waves or the three or four waves.

Described here are systems and methods for super-resolution imaging with ultrasound in which a Kalman filter-based microvessel inpainting technique is used to facilitate robust super-resolution imaging with limited or otherwise missing microbubble signals. The systems and methods described in the present disclosure can be combined with both local and global microbubble tracking methods.

By identifying locations of contrast agent response, an intensity-based metric of contrast agent signal is used to control a duration of microbubble destruction with a medical ultrasound scanner. Feedback from motion of the transducer may be used to indicate when a user perceives enough destruction. A combination of both an intensity-based metric and transducer motion may be used to control the duration of bursting.

According to one embodiment, an ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus includes processing circuitry. The processing circuitry determines whether or not to increase the number of beams to be compounded based on the information on the examination mode and increases the number of beams to be compounded when determining that the number of beams to be compounded is to be increased.

An ultrasound diagnostic apparatus 1 includes a transducer array 2, a transmission unit 3 that transmits an ultrasonic pulse FP and an ultrasonic pulse SP having phases inverted from each other on the scanning line from the transducer array 2 multiple times, a reception unit 4 that acquires reception signals from an output signal of the transducer array 2, a quadrature detection unit 5 that performs quadrature detection on the reception signals to acquire IQ signal strings, a tissue velocity detection unit 6 that detects a velocity of a tissue in a subject based on the IQ signal strings, a phase correction unit 7 that corrects phases of the IQ signal strings, a pulse inversion addition unit 8 that adds IQ signals corresponding to the ultrasonic pulse FP and IQ signals corresponding to the ultrasonic pulse SP using the corrected IQ signal strings to acquire added signals, and an image generation unit 10 that generates an ultrasound image from the added signals.

A method for determining a physical characteristic on a punctual location inside a medium, comprising the steps of: sending an emitted sequence comprising emitted pulses having different amplitudes, receiving a received sequence comprising received pulses corresponding to echoes of emitted pulses, calculating a phase difference between the received pulses relative to the emitted pulses, and determining the physical characteristic on the bases of a phase difference.

Described here are systems and methods for super-resolution imaging with ultrasound in which a Kalman filter-based microvessel inpainting technique is used to facilitate robust super-resolution imaging with limited or otherwise missing microbubble signals. The systems and methods described in the present disclosure can be combined with both local and global microbubble tracking methods.

By identifying locations of contrast agent response, an intensity-based metric of contrast agent signal is used to control a duration of microbubble destruction with a medical ultrasound scanner. Feedback from motion of the transducer may be used to indicate when a user perceives enough destruction. A combination of both an intensity-based metric and transducer motion may be used to control the duration of bursting.

An ultrasound system acquires and displays contrast-enhanced ultrasound images as a bolus of contrast agent washes into and out of a region of interest in the body. During the wash-in, wash-out cycle the operation of the ultrasound system is changed to optimize system performance for different portions of the contrast cycle. The ultrasound transmission, receive signal processing, and image processing are among the operations of the ultrasound system which may be changed. The changes in system operation are invoked automatically at predetermined times or event occurrence during the wash-in, wash-out cycle.