Volumetric ultrasound image-forming using fully controllable 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays

In real-time 3-D ultrasound imaging using 2-D array transducers, a large number of the 2-D array elements pose challenges in fabricating and transferring signals from/into the system. This fabrication problem has been solved by using a silicon micromachining process for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays. For real-time 3-D ultrasound imaging, manipulating massive ultrasound data acquired from a large number of system channels is a challenge as is fabricating and interconnecting hundreds or thousands of elements of 2-D array with the imaging system's front-end (FE) electronics. Minimizing the number of transmitting and receiving elements and the firing events without degrading the image quality is one of the solutions to reduce the overall system complexity and improve the frame rate. We have been developing a real-time 3-D volumetric ultrasound imaging system using 2-D CMUT arrays by integrating FE electronics with a large number of 2-D array elements. Here, we explore a configuration method to design a scalable 2-D CMUT array and a new volumetric image-formation method to provide higher information rate of a volume image. In this paper, we present the 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays designed to reduce the overall system complexity, and a new volume scanning and image-forming method for real-time 3-D volumetric ultrasonic imaging using 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays. To evaluate our works, we performed from theoretical studies for point spread functions of the array configuration to phantom experiments with off-the-line images.