Described herein are systems and methods for suppressing speckle noise in
ultrasound imaging. In an embodiment, speckle noise suppression is
provided by incoherently summing echo waves that impinge the active
aperture of the transducers. This incoherent summation prevents echo
waves from destructively interfering and therefore prevents the signal
`nulls` that characterize speckle noise. In an exemplary embodiment, the
incoherent summation is performed by sub-dividing a transducer into a
plurality of smaller transducers and incoherently summing the electrical
signals from the smaller transducers. In one exemplary embodiment, each
of the smaller transducers is coupled to a separate rectifier, which
rectifies the electrical signal from the respective transducer into a
rectified signal. The rectified signals from the rectifiers are then
summed to provide the incoherent summation.