Development of High-Frequency (>60 MHz) Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS) Transducer by Using Asymmetric Electrodes for Improved Beam Profile

In most commercial single-element intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) transducers, with 20 MHz to 40 MHz center frequencies, a conductive adhesive is used to bond a micro-sized cable for the signal line to the surface of the transducer aperture (<1 mm × 1 mm size) where ultrasound beam is generated. Therefore, the vibration of the piezoelectric layer is significantly disturbed by the adhesive with the signal line, thereby causing problems, such as reduced sensitivity, shortened penetration depth, and distorted beam profile. This phenomenon becomes more serious as the center frequency of the IVUS transducer is increased, and the aperture size becomes small. Therefore, we propose a novel IVUS acoustic stack employing asymmetric electrodes with conductive and non-conductive backing blocks. The purpose of this study is to verify the extent of performance degradation caused by the adhesive with the signal line, and to demonstrate how much performance degradation can be minimized by the proposed scheme. Finite element analysis (FEA) simulation was conducted, and the results show that −3 dB, −6 dB, and −10 dB penetration depths of the conventional transducer were shortened by 20%, 25%, and 19% respectively, while those of the proposed transducer were reduced only 3%, 4%, and 0% compared with their ideal transducers which have the same effective aperture size. Besides, the proposed transducer improved the −3 dB, −6 dB, and −10 dB penetration depths by 15%, 12%, and 10% respectively, compared with the conventional transducer. We also fabricated a 60 MHz IVUS transducer by using the proposed technique, and high-resolution IVUS B-mode (brightness mode) images were obtained. Thus, the proposed scheme can be one of the potential ways to provide more uniform beam profile resulting in improving the signal to noise ratio (SNR) in IVUS image.