ULTRASONIC IMAGING SYSTEM PROBE, AND A SYSTEM AND A METHOD OF IMAGING Russian patent published in 2020 - IPC A61B8/00 G01S15/89 G01S7/52 

FIELD: medical equipment.

SUBSTANCE: group of inventions relates to an ultrasonic imaging system probe, and to the entire system as a whole, and to a visualization method, in particular, it relates to analogue-to-digital converter circuits used in such imaging applications. Ultrasonic imaging system probe comprises: imaging converter head, configured to transmit an ultrasonic signal at the frequency of the transmitted ultrasound, and a receiving circuit for processing the received reflected ultrasonic signals. Receiving circuit comprises an analogue-to-digital sigma-delta converter, which comprises a closed loop, which comprises an adjustable band-pass filter with an adjustable center frequency and bandwidth. Passing center of tuned band-pass filter is tunable between first frequency, which corresponds to transmitted ultrasound frequency, and a second frequency which corresponds to the desired harmonic of the transmitted ultrasound frequency. Ultrasonic diagnostic imaging system comprises: ultrasonic imaging system probe described above, controller for probing control, a beam former and a signal processing circuit for processing signals from the reception circuit for generating an ultrasound image. Ultrasonic imaging method comprises: providing an ultrasonic signal to the visualized volume using a rendering converter head and processing the received reflected ultrasonic signals by tuning the band filter within the closed loop of the analogue-to-digital sigma-delta converter. Bandpass filter has an adjustable center frequency and bandwidth. Method involves setting the pass band center of the tuned band-pass filter to the frequency of the transmitted ultrasound or to the desired harmonic of the transmitted ultrasound frequency. This allows analogue-to-digital converter to process only the required frequency band.

EFFECT: conversion bandwidth ADC and ENOB are thus programmable, providing more efficient design of the probe, as well as providing analog-to-digital conversion already in the signal processing circuit.

13 cl, 13 dwg