Techniques are described, including systems, methods, and mechanisms/apparatus (e.g., probes), for high frequency ultrasonic imaging structure of small vessels and tissues of a surgical site during and after performing a microsurgical procedure such as ophthalmic surgical procedure and endoscopic procedure. A rotational motor and controller control a partial or full rotation of an angled transducer for scanning of tissues or small vessels using high frequency ultrasound over 30 MHz for high spatial resolution. This rotational sector or polar imaging from a rotation of an angled ultrasound transducer can be used with endoscopes or intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) systems. The rotational imaging systems and methods also can be used with the Doppler analyzer as a duplex imaging system to measure blood flow from small vessels.

　血管だけでなく，組織の硬さも考慮した穿刺範囲決定装置および方法を提供する。ドプラ処理が行われることにより，血管（32）が検出される。また，エラスト処理が行われることにより，被検体の柔らかい領域（33）が検出される。血管（32）を除く領域であって，柔らかい領域（33）の範囲が穿刺推奨範囲と決定される。穿刺推奨範囲を規定するガイド線（34）および（35）が表示される。医師は，ガイド線（34）および（35）内において針を刺し進め，穿刺対象の領域（31）に針を刺す。

An ultrasound imaging system comprising: a probe (10) with an array of transducer elements (12) for acquiring ultrasound data of a body, including moving tissue and fluid flow; a beamforming system (10, 12, 14, 16) for emitting and receiving ultrasound beams in said body, which uses, for each transmission beam, an ensemble length of more than two temporal samples and less than eight; processing means (40, 50) to process flow Doppler signals comprising adaptive clutter demodulation (21) applied on amplitude signals and mean clutter demodulation applied on phase signals followed by high-pass filtering (22, 32); and display means (55,70) to display images based on said processed flow Doppler signals.

An imaging system for an object such as human or animal tissue applies acoustic vibrations localised in two or three dimensions and simultaneously illuminates the object with an illuminating electromagnetic wave. The acoustic vibration comprises a carrier wave that is amplitude modulated by an AM waveform. The carrier wave is selected to provide the localization of the acoustic vibration, whereas the AM waveform includes a frequency component selected to provide a vibration of the object of greater magnitude than the carrier wave. To detect a Doppler component shifted by the frequency of said frequency component of the AM waveform, a signal processing apparatus comprises a phase locked-loop locked to the EM frequency, producing a frequency-demodulated signal comprising the set of the Doppler components, and a lock-in amplifier configured to extract a signal at a reference frequency equal to the frequency of a frequency component of the AM waveform.

An imaging system for an object such as human or animal tissue uses scattering of an illuminating electromagnetic wave by acoustic vibrations to generate a scattered electromagnetic wave including Doppler components shifted from the frequency of the illuminating electromagnetic wave by frequencies of the acoustic vibration and multiples thereof. An acoustic transducer apparatus applies acoustic vibrations localised in two or three dimensions in a plurality of regions. A transmitter simultaneously illuminates the object with an illuminating electromagnetic wave that has a frequency in the range from 100MHz to 100GHz, the vibration direction of the acoustic vibration having a component parallel to the propagation direction of the illuminating electromagnetic wave. A receiver receives the scattered electromagnetic wave. A signal processing apparatus derives characteristics of the Doppler components, and stores image data representing the derived characteristic.

The present invention aims at improving the Doppler imaging of a biological sample comprising blood. For this, it is proposed a method for imaging a biological sample (10), the sample (10) comprising blood (14) comprising diffusors and solid tissue (16), the method comprising obtaining observation, each observation being characterized by a different point spread function associating a signal to each location of the region of interest, the signal comprising a first contribution representative of the diffusors of blood vessels within the location, a second contribution representative of the tissue diffusors and a third contribution representative of blood signal associated to blood diffusors outside of the location, and estimating, for each location, the blood flow by using a statistical analysis.