METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR LOCKING SAMPLE SPACE ONTO MOVING VESSEL IN PULSE DOPPLER ULTRASOUND IMAGING

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To automatically maintain a Doppler sample gate position at a preselected vessel position in B-mode or color flow images during tissue or probe motion. SOLUTION: Sample gates 34 and 36 are automatically locked onto a selected vessel 30 when the vessel position changes. Optionally, a slope vessel cursor 28 is automatically updated when the vessel position changes. The pattern matching of images from successive frames is employed to determine how much a vessel in an image frame has been translated and rotated from one frame to the next. Preferably, either a cross-correlation method is applied to imaging data in a spatial domain to determine the relative translation and/or rotation of an object between the image frames, or a matched filtering method is applied to the imaging data in a frequency (i.e., Fourier) domain to determine the relative translation and/or rotation of the object between the image frames.