Ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus

• US 20030009101A1
• Filed: 06/20/2002
• Published: 01/09/2003
• Est. Priority Date: 07/02/2001
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Konica Minolta Inc.
• Original Assignee: Matsushita Electric Industrial Company Limited (Panasonic Holdings Corporation)
• Inventors: Tannaka, Yoshinao, Sunagawa, Kazuhiro, Kanai, Hiroshi
• Granted Patent: US 6,770,034 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 600/437
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 5/02007 Evaluating blood vessel condition, e.g. elasticity, compliance
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/06 Measuring blood flow measuring volume flow in general G01F, e.g. G01F1/66, G01F1/72; measuring speed of fluids in general G01P5/00
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/0858 involving measuring tissue layers, e.g. skin, interfaces
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/13 Tomography A61B8/10, A61B8/12 take precedence; tomography for radiation diagnosis A61B6/02
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/469 for selection of a region of interest
• CPC Class Codes: A61B 8/488 involving Doppler signals

Abstract

The present invention provides an ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus. The ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus comprises an ultrasonic probe (1) for transmitting ultrasonic pulses into a living body and receiving ultrasonic reflected waves from the living body, a phase-detecting section (5) for detecting each phase of the ultrasonic reflected waves, and a phase-difference detecting section (6) for determining a phase difference in the repetition period of the ultrasonic transmitting/receiving operation according to the detected phase signals. The ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus further includes a data analyzing section (7) for calculating the movement velocity of the living body tissue and the blood flow velocity according to the phase difference of the ultrasonic reflected waves and tracking the movements of the living body tissue and the blood according to the movement values calculated by the velocities, and a display section (13) for displaying the tracked results and the movement value and velocity waveform of the living body tissue and the blood simultaneously through a display control section (10).

Claims

1. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus comprising:

ultrasonic transmitting/receiving means for transmitting ultrasonic pulses into a living body and receiving ultrasonic reflected waves reflected by said living body through an ultrasonic probe;

phase detecting means for detecting each phase of said ultrasonic reflected waves received by said ultrasonic transmitting/receiving means;

phase-difference detecting means for detecting a phase-difference between a plurality of phase signals detected at a predetermined time-interval by said phase detecting means;

data analyzing means for analyzing a movement of a tissue including a blood flow in said living body according to said detected phase-difference; and

display means for displaying the movement of said living body tissue.

2. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 1, wherein said ultrasonic probe includes a plurality of ultrasonic transducers, wherein

said ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus further includes delay control means for controlling each delay value of said ultrasonic pulses and ultrasonic reflected waves which are transmitted and received by each of said plurality of ultrasonic transducers to control each deflection angle of acoustic lines defined by said ultrasonic pulses and said ultrasonic reflected waves, wherein

said phase detecting means is adapted to detect the phase-difference for each of said plurality of acoustic lines having different deflection angles, and

said data analyzing means is adapted to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of said living body tissue according to said phase-difference for each of said plurality of acoustic lines.

3. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 2, wherein said data analyzing means is adapted to detect the orthogonal and parallel components of the movement velocity of said living body tissue according to said phase-difference for each of said plurality of acoustic lines, and to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of said living body tissue according to said detected orthogonal and parallel components of the movement velocity, wherein the orthogonal and parallel components are orthogonal to and parallel to the surface of said ultrasonic probe, respectively.

4. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 2 or 3, which further includes transducer selecting means for selecting said plurality of ultrasonic transducers, said transducer selecting means being adapted to form a plurality of ultrasonic transducer sets each composed of a given number of adjacent ultrasonic transducers selected from said plurality of ultrasonic transducers, and to select a plurality of said ultrasonic transducer sets, wherein said data analyzing means is adapted to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of said living body tissue according to the phase-difference for each of the acoustic lines of said selected ultrasonic transducer sets.

5. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 4, wherein said delay control means is adapted to arbitrarily control each deflection angle of the acoustic lines of said ultrasonic transducer sets, and said data analyzing means is adapted to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of said living body tissue according to the phase-difference for each of said acoustic lines.

6. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in either one of claims 2 to 5, which further includes diagnostic-image construction means for constructing an ultrasonic diagnostic image according to information related to said ultrasonic reflected waves, wherein at least one of measurement regions can be selected from the ultrasonic diagnostic image having a plurality of measurement regions and constructed by said diagnostic image construction means, wherein said phase-difference detecting means is adapted to detect the phase-difference of the ultrasonic reflected waves associated with said at least one of selected measurement region simultaneously or almost simultaneously to allow said data analyzing means to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of said living body tissue in said selected measurement region.

7. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 6, wherein said delay control means is adapted to set each deflection angle of the acoustic lines for each of scan frames, and said phase-difference detecting means is adapted to detect the phase-difference of the ultrasonic reflected waves for each of said scan frames having said arbitrarily-set deflection angles, simultaneously or almost simultaneously, in said at least one of selected measurement region.

8. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in either one of claims 2 to 7, which further includes means for converting the movement velocity and displacement in said living body tissue to polar coordinate system to determine velocity value and angle.

9. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in either one of claims 2 to 8, which further includes electrocardiographic-signal input means for inputting a signal from an electrocardiograph, and the displaying means display an image wherein said input electrocardiographic signal and the displacement of an arterial wall are related to each other.

10. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 9, wherein said data analyzing means is adapted to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of each of an arterial wall and an intra-arterial blood flow, and to determine the relationship between the movement velocity or displacement of said arterial wall and the movement velocity or displacement of said intra-arterial blood flow so as to allow said display means to display a graph representing said relationship.

11. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in claim 9 or 10, wherein said data analyzing means is adapted to arbitrarily set a delay time from the time when an R-wave of said electrocardiographic signal is generated, and to calculate the movement velocity and displacement of each of an arterial wall and an intra-arterial blood flow at said set delay time so as to allow said display means to display a graph representing the relationship between the movement velocity or displacement of said arterial wall and the movement velocity or displacement of said intra-arterial blood flow.

12. An ultrasonic diagnostic apparatus as defined in either one of claims 9 to 11, which further includes blood-pressure input means for inputting a signal from a blood-pressure meter, wherein said data analyzing means is adapted to normalize the displacement of an intra-arterial blood flow with a maximum blood pressure and a minimum blood pressure entered from said blood-pressure meter to convert said displacement into a blood pressure variation so as to allow said display means to display a graph representing the relationship between the movement velocity or displacement of said arterial wall and said blood pressure variation.