Flexible large-area ultrasound arrays for medical applications made using embossed polymer structures.

With the huge progress in micro-electronics and artificial intelligence, the ultrasound probe has become the bottleneck in further adoption of ultrasound beyond the clinical setting (e.g. home and monitoring applications). Today, ultrasound transducers have a small aperture, are bulky, contain lead and are expensive to fabricate. Furthermore, they are rigid, which limits their integration into flexible skin patches. New ways to fabricate flexible ultrasound patches have therefore attracted much attention recently. First prototypes typically use the same lead-containing piezo-electric materials, and are made using micro-assembly of rigid active components on plastic or rubber-like substrates. We present an ultrasound transducer-on-foil technology based on thermal embossing of a piezoelectric polymer. High-quality two-dimensional ultrasound images of a tissue mimicking phantom are obtained. Mechanical flexibility and effective area scalability of the transducer are demonstrated by functional integration into an endoscope probe with a small radius of 3 mm and a large area (91.2×14 mm2) non-invasive blood pressure sensor.

Ultrasonic waves in uniaxially stressed multilayered and one-dimensional phononic structures: Guided and Floquet wave analysis.

This paper shows that acoustoelasticity in one-dimensional (1D) multilayered isotropic hyperelastic materials can be understood through the analysis of elastic wave velocities as a function of applied stress. This theoretical framework is used for eigenvalue analyses in stressed elastic structures through a reformulation of the stiffness matrix method, obtaining modal solutions, as well as reflection and transmission coefficients for different multilayered configurations. Floquet wave analysis for the stressed 1D structures is supported using numerical results.

Hyperelastic Tuning of One-Dimensional Phononic Band Gaps Using Directional Stress.

In this paper, we show that acoustoelasticity in hyperelastic materials can be understood using the framework of nonlinear wave mixing, which, when coupled with an induced static stress, leads to a change in the phase velocity of the propagating wave with no change in frequency. By performing Floquet wave eigenvalue analysis, we also show that band gaps for periodic composites, acting as 1-D phononic crystals, can be tuned using this static stress. In the presence of second-order elastic nonlinearities, the phase velocity of propagating waves in the phononic structure changes, leading to observable shifts in the band gaps. Finally, we present numerical examples as evidence that the band gaps are tuned by both the direction of the stress and its magnitude.

F-k Domain Imaging for Synthetic Aperture Sequential Beamforming.

Spatial resolution in medical ultrasound images is a key component in image quality and an important factor for clinical diagnosis. In early systems, the lateral resolution was optimal in the focus but rapidly decreased outside the focal region. Improvements have been found in, e.g., dynamic-receive beamforming, in which the entire image is focused in receive, but this requires complex processing of element data and is not applicable for mechanical scanning of single-element images. This paper exploits the concept of two-stage beamforming based on virtual source-receivers, which reduces the front-end computational load while maintaining a similar data rate and frame rate compared to dynamic-receive beamforming. We introduce frequency-wavenumber domain data processing to obtain fast second-stage data processing while having similarly high lateral resolution as dynamic-receive beamforming and processing in time-space domain. The technique is very suitable in combination with emerging technologies such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), hand-held devices, and wireless data transfer. The suggested method consists of three steps. In the first step, single-focused RF line data are shifted in time to relocate the focal point to a new origin t' = 0, z' = 0. This new origin is considered as an array of virtual source/receiver pairs, as has been suggested previously in literature. In the second step, the dataset is efficiently processed in the wavenumber-frequency domain to form an image that is in focus throughout its entire depth. In the third step, the data shift is undone to obtain a correct depth axis in the image. The method has been tested first with a single-element scanning system and second in a tissue-mimicking phantom using a linear array. In both setups, the method resulted in a −6-dB lateral point spread function (PSF) which was constant over the entire depth range, and similar to dynamic-receive beamforming and synthetic aperture sequential beamforming. The signal-to-noise ratio increased by 6 dB in both the near field and far field. These results show that the second-stage processing algorithm effectively produces a focused image over the entire depth range from a single-focused ultrasound field.