A high acuity 3-D acoustic imaging system

Abstract

The N+N imaging system solves the problem of controlling 2-D arrays with only as many control channels as there are rows and columns of elements in the acoustic array. A 10,000 element array can be controlled with only 200 control channels; a reduction in complexity that allows the possibility of a commercial medical acoustic imaging system capable of rapid 3-D, volume, images and/or real time, arbitrary scan plane, 2-D sector, planar, or curve planar images. In addition, it allows the implementation of multi-dimensional aberration correction which may allow ultrasonic images to finally approach the image acuity of MRI and X-ray CAT imaging systems, and to do so at a fraction of the costs of these imaging modalities.