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Abstract

An ultrasonic speckle velocity measurement method and apparatus that uses the transmission and reception of ultrasonic waves to detect the velocity of moving members comprised of random scattering bodies. The ultrasonic wave transmitted toward a moving measurement object containing a large number of microscopic scattering bodies, and echo signlas reflected by the measurement object are received. If, for example, the scattering bodies are blood corpuscles, the blood flow can be regarded as a random aggregation of these corpuscles, in which case the echo signal received will be the product of the random interference between waves scattered by individual corpuscles, and as such the blood flow velocity can be estimated from time-based fluctuation in the amplitude of the echo signals. Thus, the time-based fluctuation in the received echo signals is detected from, for example, the envelope signal thereof and frequency-analyzed, and from the fluctuation frequency thereof the velocity is obtained. Accordingly, without using the conventional untrasonic Doppler method is it possible to detect velocity and, in particular, to measure with accuracy even low velocities, and it is also possible to detect the velocity of moving members regardless of the direction in which the ultrasonic beam is transmitted.

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First Claim