A preliminary evaluation work on a 3-D ultrasound imaging system for 2-D array transducer

This paper presents a preliminary evaluation work on a pre-designed 3-D ultrasound imaging system. The system mainly consists of four parts, a 7.5MHz, 24x24 2-D array transducer, the transmit/receive circuit, power supply, data acquisition and real-time imaging module. The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication, which greatly reduces the number of active channels. The element area of the transduceris 4.6mm by 4.6mm, Four kinds of tests were carried out to evaluate the imaging performance, including the penetration depth range, axial and lateral resolution, positioning accuracy and 3-D imaging frame rate. Several strong reflection metal objects, fixed in a water tank, were selected for the purpose of imaging due to a low signal-to-noise ratio of the transducer. The distance between the transducer and the tested objects, the thickness of aluminum, and the seam width of the aluminum sheet were measured by a calibrated micrometer to evaluate the penetration depth, the axial and lateral resolution, respectively. The experimental results showed that the imaging penetration depth range was from 1.0cm to 6.2cm, the axial and lateral resolution were 0.32mm and 1.37mm respectively, the imaging speed was up to 27 frames per second and the positioning accuracy was 9.2%.