Reconfigurable arrays for portable ultrasound

Fisher, R. M.; Thomenius, Kai E.; Wodnicki, Robert; Thomas, R.; Cogan, Scott; Hazard, Christopher; Lee, W.; Mills, David; Khuri‐Yakub, Butrus T.; Ergun, A.S.; Yaralioglu, G.G.

doi:10.1109/ultsym.2005.1602899

Cited by 31 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Although dedicated annular ring arrays are available by custom fabrication [75,76], a generalpurpose 2D array with the proposed Column-Row-Parallel architecture can achieve similar results [77,78]. The full 2D array provides even more flexibility, since more rings can be formed within the regular 2D aperture.…”

Section: Annular Ring Apertures For Forward-looking Imaging Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Column-Row-Parallel ASIC architecture for 3D wearable / portable medical ultrasonic imaging

Chen

Lee

Sodini

2014

2014 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers

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This work presents a scalable Column-Row-Parallel ASIC architecture for 3D wearable / portable medical ultrasound. It leverages programmable electronic addressing to achieve linear scaling for both hardware interconnection and software data acquisition. A 16x16 transceiver ASIC is fabricated and flip-chip bonded to a 16x16 capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) to demonstrate the compact, low-power front-end assembly. A 3D plane-wave coherent compounding algorithm is designed for fast volume rate (62.5 volume/s), high quality 3D ultrasonic imaging. An interleaved checker board pattern with I&Q excitations is also proposed for ultrasonic harmonic imaging, reducing transmitted second harmonic distortion by over 20dB, applicable to nonlinear transducers and circuits with arbitrary pulse shapes.Each transceiver circuit is element-matched to its CMUT element. The high voltage transmitter employs a 3-level pulse-shaping technique with charge recycling to enhance the power efficiency, requiring minimum off-chip components. Compared to traditional 2-level pulsers, 50% more acoustic power delivery is obtained with the same total power dissipation. The receiver is implemented with a transimpedance amplifier topology and achieves a lowest noise efficiency factor in the literature (2.1 compared to a previously reported lowest of 3.6, in unit of mP a · mW/Hz). A source follower stage is specially designed to combine the analog outputs of receivers in parallel, improving output SNR as parallelization increases and offering flexibility for imaging algorithm design. Lastly, fault-tolerance is incorporated into the transceiver to deal with faulty elements within the 2D MEMS transducer array, increasing yield for the system assembly.

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Section: Annular Ring Apertures For Forward-looking Imaging Applicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Column-Row-Parallel ASIC architecture for 3D wearable / portable medical ultrasonic imaging

Chen

Lee

Sodini

2014

2014 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Digest of Technical Papers

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“…The dynamic part of the force in (1) is given by (2) where Δω is the difference of frequencies ω 1 and ω 2 .…”

Section: A Dynamic Acoustic Radiation Forcementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reconfigurable arrays (RCA) are two-dimensional ultrasound transducers in which elements are dynamically connected in groups using microelectronic processes [2]. The dynamic combining of elements allows different settings of apertures, focusing, and electronic steering, with the advantage of requiring fewer number of channels [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Vibro-acoustography beam formation with reconfigurable arrays

Urban¹,

Kamimura

Carneiro

et al. 2011

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

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In this work, we present a numerical study of the use of reconfigurable arrays (RCA) for vibroacoustography (VA) beam formation. A parametric study of the aperture selection, number of channels, number of elements, focal distance, and steering parameters is presented in order to show the feasibility and evaluate the performance of VA imaging based on RCA. The transducer aperture was based on two concentric arrays driven by two continuous-wave or toneburst signals at slightly different frequencies. The mathematical model considers a homogeneous, isotropic, inviscid medium. The point-spread function of the system is calculated based on angular spectrum methods using the Fresnel approximation for rectangular sources. Simulations considering arrays with 50 × 50 to 200 × 200 elements with number of channels varying in the range of 32 to 128 are evaluated to identify the best configuration for VA. Advantages of two dimensional and RCA arrays and aspects related to clinical importance of the RCA implementation in VA such as spatial resolution, image frame-rate, and commercial machine implementation are discussed. It is concluded that RCA transducers can produce spatial resolution similar to confocal transducers, steering is possible in elevation and azimuthal planes, and optimal settings for number of elements, number of channels, maximum steering, and focal distance are suggested for VA clinical application. Furthermore, an optimization for beam steering based on the channel assignment is proposed for balancing the contribution of the two waves in the steered focus.This work was done while the first author was at Mayo Clinic as a visiting graduate student.Disclosure of financial interest: Mayo Clinic and one of the authors (MF) have a financial interest associated with the technology used in this research; the technology has been licensed in part for some specific application areas to industry. NIH Public Access

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“…We review published work and then consider a new approach. GE and Stanford [18] have made reconfigurable annular arrays generated from a matrix of cMUTs, and a switching ASIC for portable applications. The objective was to cut down on the channel count at the system.…”

Section: Reconfigurable Arraysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

Daft

2010

2010 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposium

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While ultrasound's cost, safety and interesting contrast mechanisms are of great clinical value, its operatordependence, extensive sonographer training needs, uncompetitive scan times, poor ergonomics and low reproducibility in serial studies limit its proliferation. This paper examines opportunities to solve these problems and increase ultrasound's application space via arrays which conform to the patient's body contours. Progress towards a conformable array maintaining ultrasound's existing feature set has been promising, but a complete system is yet to be demonstrated. The article first outlines the motivation for such arrays, defines design requirements, and describes an ideal design. Next, work on partial hardware realizations of conformable arrays is reviewed, and types of signal processing specific to conformable systems are discussed. Finally, future research directions are envisioned.Operator-independent ultrasound requires large acquisition volumes with voxels isotropic enough to allow post-scan clinical assessment without regard for scanning geometry. Information rate is presented as a useful metric to compare the diagnostic utility of these systems. Two new hardware realizations are described to illustrate progress towards the conformable array goal. An automated breast-scanning design with a matrix receiver using silicon transducers (cMUTs) shows provocative performance in a micro-calcification detection simulation. A reconfigurable matrix array, also using cMUTs, provides volume imaging performance characteristic of a fully-sampled aperture with sufficiently modest interconnect demands to be feasible in a transesophageal echo (TEE) application.

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Reconfigurable arrays for portable ultrasound

Cited by 31 publications

References 3 publications

A Column-Row-Parallel ASIC architecture for 3D wearable / portable medical ultrasonic imaging

A Column-Row-Parallel ASIC architecture for 3D wearable / portable medical ultrasonic imaging

Vibro-acoustography beam formation with reconfigurable arrays

Conformable transducers for large-volume, operator-independent imaging

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