Systems of generating and manipulating an ultrasound beam are disclosed.
The system uses selective sets of ultrasound elements to generate an
ultrasound beam, scanning the beam over a series of ultrasound elements
in order to collected echo data covering an area, and generating an image
from the resulting data. The scanning process includes shifting the set
of ultrasound elements used to form the ultrasound beam by more then one
ultrasound element (block-switching) between each step in the scanning
process. This is accomplished without loss of image resolution by using
area-forming techniques. The block-switching technique enables use of
cross-correlation methods during image construction.