BEAMFORMING TIME DELAY CORRECTION FOR ULTRASONIC SCANNER

摘要

This invention is an ultrasonic imaging system comprising a transducer array (11) comprised of a plurality of separately driven elements (12) which each produce a burst of vibratory energy when energized by a pulse produced by a transmitter (13). A display (17) receives a series of data samples produced by receiver (14) for all the scan lines and converts the data to a form producing one frame of a desired image. The system performs a scan in which beam forming time delay errors due to non-uniformity in sound speed within the transmission medium are corrected. Time delay errors are measured by cross-correlating the channel signal in each respective one of the receiver channels with a reference beam sum signal produced by summing all the receiver channel signals.