James R Mniece

US Patent:

54430704, Aug 22, 1995

Filed:

Aug 17, 1994

Appl. No.:

8/291637

Inventors:

James R. Mniece - Waltham MA

Assignee:

Hewlett-Packard Company - Palo Alto CA

International Classification:

A61B 800

US Classification:

12866101

Abstract:

A probe in an ultrasound imaging system uses electrostrictive transducer elements that exhibit little or no piezoelectric properties when in an unbiased state, but do exhibit them when a bias is applied. A linear array of a large number of electrostrictive transducer elements in a probe are provided with an aperture that is shifted across the probe by biasing on and off banks of interconnected electrostrictive transducer elements. The progression of transducer elements from one end of the probe to the other is divided or grouped into adjacent banks of consecutive transducer elements. Each bank has the same number (n) of transducer elements. Each of the n-many transducer elements within a bank has a bias terminal, a signal return or ground terminal and a driven terminal. All the ground terminals are common and connected to a signal return, or ground. The driven terminal of each transducer element in a bank is connected in parallel with the corresponding transducer element in every other bank.

US Patent:

49268724, May 22, 1990

Filed:

Mar 28, 1988

Appl. No.:

7/173763

Inventors:

Paul R. Kranz - Harvard MA
James R. Mniece - Waltham MA
Karl E. Thiele - Derry NH
Bernard J. Savord - Ithaca NY
Richard B. Smith - Tewksbury MA

Assignee:

Hewlett-Packard Company - Palo Alto CA

International Classification:

A61B 800

US Classification:

12866101

Abstract:

This invention provides an ultrasonic transducer system which utilizes a reconfigurable delay line to perform a variety of processing functions. In particular, for a preferred embodiment, the delay line utilized to sum the outputs of transducer elements is reconfigurable to provide serial processing of image scan lines while providing parallel processing of Doppler color flow scan lines. More particularly, the echo signals generated in response to the packet of color flow lines utilized to generate color flow information are applied in a predetermined way to two separate portions of the delay line, the portions of the delay line having different delay profiles, the resulting outputs being focussed to slightly different points in the image and thus providing color flow packets for two separate points in response to the transmission of a single packet of color flow lines. This results in a substantial enhancement of the system frame rate. Other possible applications of the reconfigurable delay line in an ultrasonic scanning system are also discussed, and a packet serializer is disclosed which buffers, sequences, and preprocesses the received packet data.