Instructor: Charles S. Desilets, UltraSound Solutions
Ultrasonic transducers have been employed in medical imaging systems for over twenty years and have become commonplace with the success of electronically scanned and focussed imaging systems. This tutorial course will begin with a brief overview of the dominant medican imaging modalities and the types of transducer arrays employed in these applications. Basic transducer array requirements based on these applications will be discussed, as well as the tradeoffs made for many common clinical probe designs using linear, convex, phased or annular arrays. Achievement of the basic imaging system beamforming requirements depends on the detailed desing of the transducer array element.
Transducer desing will be initially discussed for the simple, large area piston transducer to introduce the basic desing concepts. These concepts will then be extended to array element designs. The vibration modes of the piezoeletric ceramic array element commonly employed will be discussed in detail, as well as design issues with matching layers, backing blocks, kerf filters, elevation focusing, electrical interconnect, and eleclectrical impedance matching. Several commonly used array architectures will be reviewed as well as the design tradeoffs made in choosing these design approaches. Finally, the dditional array issues arising from the use of elevational or two-dimensional focusing will be reviewed.
Charles S. Desilets received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Engineering Physics from the Ohio State University in 1969. He completed his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1978 at Stanford University after four years with Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1996, he established a consulting practice, UltraSound Solutions, which provides expertise in the design, development, and manufacture of ultrasound transducers and arrays for imaging, therapeutic, sonar, and Doppler applications.
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Updated July 15, 1996.
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