Digital scanline signal processor for an ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system

摘要

A digital scanline signal processor which processes beamformed echo signals includes a normalization circuit, a speckle reduction processor, and a gain stage which amplifies detected echo signals. The normalization circuit applies depth dependent gain to the scanline signals to equalize the amplitudes in channels of the processor with different passband characteristics. A log compression circuit includes two compression functions for low level and high level echo signals.