Siemens Medical Solutions Usa, Inc.

General Electric Company

Xuan-Ming Lu

Lowell Scott Smith

Lewis Jones Thomas, Iii

Worth B Walters

Theodore Lauer Rhyne

Timothy L Proulx

Jian-Hua Mo

Nim Hak Tea

A transducer array includes two or more sub-arrays that move relative to each other. Position sensors on each of the sub-arrays provide spatial coordination for beamforming and/or image forming to yield extended field of view and high image resolution. The adaptable transducer array, such as mounted on a flexible transducer housing, allows the array to better conform to the patient during internal or external use.

Flexible ultrasound transducer array

In kmode, a vibration is along an axis or orthogonal to the poling or electric field orientation. The direction of vibration is toward a face of an ultrasound transducer array. For each element of the array, electrodes are formed perpendicular to the face of the array, such as along the sides of the elements. Piezoelectric material is poled along a dimension parallel with the face of the transducer and perpendicular to the direction of acoustic energy propagation. Using elements designed for kresonant mode operation may provide for a better electrical impedance match, such as where small elements sizes are provided for a multi-dimensional transducer arrays. For additional impedance matching, the elements may be made from multiple layers of piezoelectric ceramic. Since the elements operate from a kmode, the layers are stacked along the poling direction or perpendicular to a face of the transducer array for transmitting or receiving acoustical energy.

Multi-dimensional ultrasound transducer array

An ultrasound transducer employs a silicon acoustic matching layer closest to the piezoelectric layer in order to achieve improved resolution. A silicon wafer, ground to an appropriate thickness, is included in the acoustic stack with other matching layer materials during transducer construction. The exact thickness is determined by the details of the design, but is nominally a quarter wavelength in the silicon.

Ultrasound transducer for improving resolution in imaging system

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Xuan-Ming Lu