PHASED ARRAY ACOUSTIC DEVICE PROVIDED WITH INTRA-GROUP PROCESSOR

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an ultrasonic wave image pickup device practical in terms of size, cost and complication to be operated at a sufficiently high speed for capturing the image of a moving organ. SOLUTION: Respective intra-group reception processors 441-44N are provided with delay and addition elements for receiving transducer signals corresponding to an echo from a transmission acoustic beam from the transducer element of a connected sub array and delaying and adding the received transducer signals. Also, a reception beam former 46 provided with some processing channels connected to the intra-group reception processors is provided and the respective processing channels are provided with beam former delay for synthesizing a reception beam from the echo by delaying signals received from the intra-group reception processors and a beam former adder 50 for receiving and adding the signals from the processing channels.