Patent application number | Description | Published |
20090039738 | High frequency ultrasound transducers based on ceramic films - A design and a manufacturing method of ultrasound transducers based on films of ferro-electric ceramic material is presented, the transducers being particularly useful for operating at frequencies above 10 MHz. The manufacturing technique can involve tape-casting of the ceramic films, deposition of the ceramic films onto a substrate with thick film printing, sol-gel, or other deposition techniques, where manufacturing methods for load matching layers and composite ceramic layers are described. The designs also involve acoustic load matching layers that provide particularly wide bandwidth of the transducers, and also multi-band operation of the transducers. The basic designs can be used for elements in a transducer array, that provides the frequency characteristics of the single element transducers, for array steering of the focus and possibly also direction of a pulsed ultrasound beam at high frequencies and multi-band frequencies. | 02-12-2009 |
20090182237 | Dual Frequency Band Ultrasound Transducer Arrays - An acoustic probe transmits/receives acoustic pulses with frequencies both in a high frequency (HF), and a selectable amount of lower frequency (LF1, LF2, . . . , LFn, . . . ) bands. The radiation surfaces of at least two of the multiple frequency bands have a common region. The arrays and elements can be of a general type such as annular arrays, phased or switched arrays, linear arrays with division in both azimuth and elevation direction, like a 1.5D, a 1.75D and a full 2D array, or curved arrays. The element division, array type, and array aperture sizes for the different bands can also be different. | 07-16-2009 |
20090240152 | Digital Ultrasound Beam Former with Flexible Channel and Frequency Range Reconfiguration - A digital ultrasound beam former for ultrasound imaging, that can be configured by a control processor to process the signals from ultrasound transducer arrays with variable number of elements at variable sampling frequencies, where the lowest sampling frequency allows for the highest number of array elements. The maximal number of array elements is reduced in the inverse proportion to the sampling frequency. The beam former can be operated both in a RF-sampling mode and a quadrature mode. Parallel coupling of transmit/receive circuits for each element allow adaption of the receive Noise Figure and transmit drive capabilities to variations in the electrical impedance of the array elements. | 09-24-2009 |
20090247879 | Extended ultrasound imaging probe for insertion into the body - An ultrasound imaging probe for real time 3D ultrasound imaging from the tip of the probe that can be inserted into the body. The ultrasound beam is electronically scanned within a 2D azimuth plane with a linear array, and scanning in the elevation direction at right angle to the azimuth plane is obtained by mechanical movement of the array. The mechanical movement is either achieved by rotation of the array through a flexible wire, or through wobbling of the array, for example through hydraulic actuation. The probe can be made both flexible and stiff, where the flexible embodiment is particularly interesting for catheter imaging in the heart and vessels, and the stiff embodiment has applications in minimal invasive surgery and other procedures. The probe design allows for low cost manufacturing which allows factory sterilized probes to be disposed after use. | 10-01-2009 |
20100036244 | Nonlinear Elastic Wave Measurement and Imaging with Two-Frequency Elastic Wave Pulse Complexes - Methods and instruments for suppression of multiple scattering noise and extraction of nonlinear scattering components with measurement or imaging of a region of an object with elastic waves, where elastic wave pulse complexes are transmitted towards said region where said pulse complexes are composed of a high frequency (HF) and a low frequency (LF) pulse with the same or overlapping beam directions and where the HF pulse is so close to the LF pulse that it observes the modification of the object by the LF pulse at least for a part of the image depth. The frequency and/or amplitude and/or phase of said LF pulse relative to said HF pulse varies for transmitted pulse complexes in order to nonlinearly manipulate the object elasticity observed by the HF pulse along at least parts of its propagation, and where received HF signals are picked up by transducers from one or both of scattered and transmitted components of the transmitted HF pulses. Said received HF signals are processed to form measurement or image signals for display, and where in the process of forming said measurement or image signals said received HF signals are one or both of delay corrected with correction delay in the fast time (depth-time), and pulse distortion corrected in the fast time, and combined in slow time to form noise suppressed HF signals or nonlinear scattering HF signals that are used for further processing to form measurement or image signals. The methods are applicable to elastic waves where the material elasticity is nonlinear in relation to the material deformation. | 02-11-2010 |
20140150556 | Measurement and Imaging of Scatterers with Memory of Scatterer Parameters Using at Least Two-Frequency Elastic Wave Pulse Complexes - Measurement or imaging of elastic wave nonlinear scatterers with a memory of scattering parameters comprises selecting LF pulses having characteristics to change the scattering parameters of nonlinear scatterers. A transmit time relation is selected so that the incident HF pulse propagates sufficiently close to the LF pulse that the effect of the incident LF pulse on its scatterer parameters is observed by the HF pulse. At least two elastic wave pulse complexes comprising a high frequency (HF) pulse and a selected low frequency (LF) pulse are transmitted towards the region. Received HF signals are combined to form nonlinear HF signals representing the scatterers with memory, with suppression of received HF signals from other scatterers. At least one of the received HF signals may be corrected by time delay correction and/or speckle correction with a speckle correction filter, determined by movement of the scattering object. Systems are also disclosed. | 06-05-2014 |