Apparatus and system for real-time synthetic focus ultrasonic imaging

Abstract

An apparatus for use in an ultrasonic imaging system adapted for generating synthetic focus images in real-time. The apparatus employs an integrated circuit architecture which is scalable and can be employed to construct real-time synthetic focus ultrasonic imaging systems having a large number of transducer array elements. The apparatus utilizes one field programmable gate array per image channel for data storage and sub-image generation. Each field programmable gate array includes on-chip block memories to store digitized ultrasonic signal return echo data and at least one block memory used to store data associated with each ultrasonic transmitter-receiver array pair. Logic inside the field programmable gate array calculates memory addresses during image generation to generate a time-of-flight surface and to form sub-images.