MULTI-LINE BEAMFORMING EXTENTION USING SUB-ARRAYS

摘要

Provided is a multi-line beamformer (100) that generates a multi-line output (141-144) by positioning multiple receive beams within the area covered by a transmit beam. N multi-line beams are generated using N/M fully capable beamformers (111-116) by producing partial sums (121-128) from sub-groups (105-108) of the elements of the beamformers (111-116), where M depends upon a per channel element spacing measured in wavelengths of the imaging frequency.