An ultrasound beamformer using oversampling

Oversampled analog to digital converters (delta-sigma A/Ds) have been proposed to radically reduce the size, cost and power consumption of digital ultrasound beamformers. Simply replacing conventional A/Ds with single bit oversampled versions, however, produces significant image artifacts for a dynamic focus system. In addition, spectral Doppler measurements are severely compromised. Here, the authors disclose a complete beamformer exploiting oversampling principles on both transmit and receive that doesn't suffer from these problems. The architecture preserves the simplicity of an oversampled design, yet produces high quality B-scan and color flow images, as well as sensitive spectral Doppler measurements. Here, the authors present simulations and emulations using actual array data, to demonstrate the capabilities of the system.