The invention provides an ultrasound system comprising an ultrasound probe, adapted to transmit and receive ultrasound signals, and an interventional device for insertion into a vessel of a subject. The interventional device includes an ultrasound transducer adapted to acquire a first set of ultrasound data at a first ultrasound frequency, wherein the first set of ultrasound data relates to flow data. The ultrasound system is further adapted exchange a second set of ultrasound data between the ultrasound probe and the interventional device at a second ultrasound frequency different from the first ultrasound frequency, wherein the second ultrasound data relates to interventional device positioning data.

The invention provides an ultrasound processing unit. A controller (18) of the unit is adapted to receive ultrasound data of an anatomical region, for example of the heart. The controller processes the ultrasound data over a period of time to monitor and detect whether alignment of a particular anatomical feature (34) represented in the data relative to a field of view (36) of the transducer unit is changing over time. In the event that the alignment is changing, the controller generates an output signal for communicating this to a user, allowing a user to be alerted at an early stage to likelihood of misalignment and loss of imaging or measurement capability.

A dual frequency transducer array includes one or more low frequency transducer arrays and a high frequency transducer array. Unfocused ultrasound such as plane waves are transmitted by the one or more low frequency transducer arrays in a number of different directions into an imaging region of the high frequency transducer array. High frequency echo signals produced by excited contrast agent in the imaging region are received by the high frequency transducer array to produce a contrast agent image. In another embodiment, the high frequency transducer produces unfocused ultrasound to excite the contrast agent in the imaging region and the low frequency transducer(s) receives low frequency echo signals from the excited contrast agent. A tissue image is created from echo signals received by the high or low frequency transducer. Echo data from the tissue image and the contrast agent image are combined to produce a combined tissue/contrast agent image.

A device and a control program of a device. According to an embodiment, the device includes a display and a processor. The processor is configured to display first and second B-mode images created based on an echo signal of an ultrasonic pulse acquired from a subject on the display. The first and second B-mode images displayed on the display are moving images, and the first and second B-mode images of each frame forming the moving image are created based on the same echo signal. The second B-mode image is displayed smaller than the first B-mode image on the display.

In an ultrasound diagnostic apparatus and an operation method of the ultrasound diagnostic apparatus of the invention, a control circuit performs polarization processing on a plurality of ultrasound transducers in a non-diagnosis period, during which transmission of ultrasound waves and reception of reflected waves for performing ultrasound diagnosis are not performed, in a case where the cumulative driving time of the plurality of ultrasound transducers for performing the ultrasound diagnosis becomes equal to or longer than a specified time. A transmission circuit generates a first transmission signal having a driving voltage for performing ultrasound diagnosis using a pulse generation circuit in the case of performing the ultrasound diagnosis, and generates a second transmission signal having a polarization voltage for performing polarization processing using the same pulse generation circuit as in the case of generating the first transmission signal in the case of performing the polarization processing.

An ultrasound diagnosis apparatus according to an embodiment includes processing circuitry. The processing circuitry is configured: to generate a piece of reflected-wave data by performing a phased addition process while using reflected-wave signals generated by transmitting an ultrasound wave with respect to mutually the same scanning line; to speculate a degree of saturation of the reflected-wave signals observed before the phased addition process on the basis of a relationship between signals and noise in a data sequence represented by a set made up of pieces of the reflected-wave data; and to output a result of the speculation. The processing circuitry is configured to cause a display to display data based on the result of the speculation.

A Doppler waveform generation unit 30 obtains Doppler information from a reception signal collected from a diagnosis region and generates a Doppler waveform. An initial time-phase setting unit 40 sets a beginning initial time-phase and an ending initial time-phase of the Doppler waveform. In the setting, an electrocardiographic waveform signal obtained from a subject using an electrocardiograph or the like and learned data stored in a learned data storage unit 60 are used. A measurement time-phase search unit 50 searches for a beginning time-phase of the Doppler waveform near the beginning initial time-phase, and searches for an ending time-phase of the Doppler waveform near the ending initial time-phase. In the search process, the learned data stored in the learned data storage unit 60 is used.

A system is described for generating diagnostic information from a video sequence of ultrasound images acquired in “blind sweeps”, i.e., without operator seeing ultrasound images as they are acquired. We disclose two different types of machine learning systems for predicting diagnostic information: a “Temporal Accumulation” system and a “3-D Modeling Component” system. These machine learning systems could be implemented in several possible ways: using just one or the other of them in any given implementation, or using both of them in combination. We also disclose a computing system which implements (a) an image selection system including at least one machine learning model trained to identify clinically suitable images from the sequence of ultrasound images and (b) an image diagnosis/measurement system including of one or more machine learning models, configured to obtain the clinically suitable images identified by the image selection system and further process such images to predict health states.

A non-transitory computer-readable recording medium stores therein a learning program that causes a computer to execute a process including: generating a shadow image including a shadow according to a state of ultrasound reflection in an ultrasound image; generating a combined image by combining the ultrasound image and the shadow image; inputting, into a first decoder and a second decoder, an output acquired from an encoder in response to inputting the combined image into the encoder; and executing training of the encoder, the first decoder, and the second decoder, based on: reconfigured error between an output image of a coupling function and the combined image, the coupling function being configured to combine a first image output from the first decoder with a second image output from the second decoder, and an error function between an area in the first image and the shadow in the shadow image.

Multi-modal medical image registration and associated devices, systems, and methods are provided. For example, a method of medical imaging can include: receiving a first image of a patients anatomy in a first imaging modality; receiving a second image of the patients anatomy in a second, different imaging modality; determining a first pose of the first image relative to a reference coordinate system of the patients anatomy; determining a second pose of the second image relative to the reference coordinate system; determining co-registration data between the first image and the second image based on the first pose and the second pose; and outputting, to a display, the first image co-registered with the second image based on the co-registration data.