Ultrasound probe with integrated electronics

Abstract

A hand-held ultrasound system includes integrated electronics within an ergonomic housing. The electronics includes control circuitry, beamforming and circuitry transducer drive circuitry. The electronics communicate with a host computer using an industry standard high speed serial bus. The ultrasonic imaging system is operable on a standard, commercially available, user computing device without specific hardware modifications, and is adapted to interface with an external application without modification to the ultrasonic imaging system to allow a user to gather ultrasonic data on a standard user computing device such as a PC, and employ the data so gathered via an independent external application without requiring a custom system, expensive hardware modifications, or system rebuilds. An integrated interface program allows such ultrasonic data to be invoked by a variety of such external applications having access to the integrated interface program via a standard, predetermined platform such as visual basic or c++.

Description

CROSS REFERENCES TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application is a divisional of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 354,946, filed Jan. 30, 2003, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 10 / 094,950, filed Mar. 11, 2002, which is a continuation-in-part of International Application No. PCT / US02 / 05764, filed on Feb. 22, 2002, which is continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 822,764, filed Mar. 30, 2001, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 791,491, filed Feb. 22, 2001, which is a continuation-in-part of. International Application No. PCT / US00 / 17236, filed on Jun. 22, 2000, which is a continuation-in-part of U.S. application Ser. No. 09 / 449,780, filed on Nov. 26, 1999 and claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Application No. 60 / 140,430, filed on Jun. 22, 1999, the entire contents of the above applications being incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Conventional ultrasound imaging system...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

Enables efficient ultrasonic data gathering and processing on standard user computing devices, facilitating integration with external applications and reducing the need for expensive hardware upgrades, while providing a portable and versatile ultrasound imaging solution for various medical and diagnostic applications.

Problems solved by technology

These imaging systems tend to be unwieldy, expensive, and difficult to upgrade.

Further, since dedicated systems have specialized components, it is difficult to employ the gathered ultrasound data in other contexts, such as by downloading to another application for processing and / or operations which are unavailable on the native dedicated system.

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