A Miniature Real-Time Volumetric Ultrasound Imaging System

Progress made in the development of a miniature real-time volumetric ultrasound imaging system is presented. This system is targeted for use in a 5-mm endoscopic channel and will provide real-time, 30-mm deep, volumetric images. It is being developed as a clinically useful device, to demonstrate a means of integrating the front-end electronics with the transducer array, and to demonstrate the advantages of the capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) technology for medical imaging. Presented here is the progress made towards the initial implementation of this system, which is based on a two-dimensional, 16x16 CMUT array. Each CMUT element is 250 μm by 250 μm and has a 5-MHz center frequency. The elements are connected to bond pads on the back side of the array with 400-μm long through-wafer interconnects. The transducer array is flip-chip bonded to a custom-designed integrated circuit that comprises the front-end electronics. The result is that each transducer element is connected to a dedicated pulser and low-noise preamplifier. The pulser generates 25-V, 100-ns wide, unipolar pulses. The preamplifier has an approximate transimpedance gain of 500 kΩ and 3-dB bandwidth of 10 MHz. In the first implementation of the system, one element at a time can be selected for transmit and receive and thus synthetic aperture images can be generated. In future implementations, 16 channels will be active at a given time. These channels will connect to an FPGA-based data acquisition system for real-time image reconstruction.