This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project proposes to develop Micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) based, fully populated two-dimensional (2D) ultrasonic transducer array for three dimensional (3D) imaging in real time. Current 2D ultrasound systems employ a linear array of transducers to accumulate images. A planar array is universally acknowledged as the ideal approach for 3D image acquisition; however, multiple challenges must be overcome to make this practical, including: limitations in existing piezoelectric transducer technology, connecting an array with many elements (e.g., > 16,000) to front-end electronics, and processing large amounts of image data in real-time. The highly collaborative Phase II effort will build upon design and simulation results from the The system architecture will provide substantial flexibility in applying digital processing techniques, including adaptive beamforming, synthetic apertures, and phase aberration correction.
The developed technology could bring many new capabilities to medical imaging, including volumetric flow, and real-time 3D imaging for tumor evaluation, image-guided surgery, and fetal echocardiography. Some of these include a breakthrough planar array technology overcomes a key bottleneck in the state-of-the-art in ultrasound, with spillover contributions to non-ultrasound fields (e.g. other MEMS, sonar, other medical imaging, nondestructive testing).
