ULTRASOUND IMAGING APPARATUS

摘要

The present invention makes it possible to find a weight value used in phasing processing for a reception signal in an ultrasound imaging apparatus, accurately and with less computation, by an adaptive signal processing technique. An ultrasound signal from a subject is received by a plurality of elements (401), and the degree of similarity between reception signals x(n) is found by a degree-of-similarity computation unit (404). The degree of similarity C(n) between the reception signals as found by the degree-of-similarity computation unit (404) is used by an adaptive weight computation unit (407) to find an adaptive weight w(n) corresponding to the degree of similarity. The adaptive weight w(n) and the reception signals x(n) are used by a phasing computation unit (408) to generate a phasing output. An image processing unit (108) uses the phasing output to create image data. For example, the degree-of-similarity computation unit (404) computes the degree of similarity in the time direction.