Method and apparatus for polynomial approximation of nonlinear operations in medical ultrasound imaging

摘要

Methods and apparatus for reducing the amount of computation required by nonlinear operations in medical ultrasound imaging by using lower- order polynomials to approximate the nonlinear functions. The method can be applied to envelope detection, phase detection, logarithmic compression and other nonlinear functions. Various pre- processing techniques (e.g., pre-reducing the data range and pre- dividing an entire range of the input into a number of subranges) can optionally be used prior to the polynomial approximation to achieve better accuracy, further reduce the polynomial order, and/or simplify the implementation.