Fuzzy Evaluation System of Velocity and Thickness by Multi-Direction Ultrasonic Probe

Development of an ultrasonic device to image the hardness of tissues is important for a cancer diagnosis. Conventional methods cannot precisely measure the size of object, because the sound speed of a material is unknown. We propose a fuzzy inference system for ultrasonic imaging based on the velocity of materials. This method consists of three stages. In the first stage, the surface of the object and the bottom are decided by using a fuzzy inference. In the second stage, we measure the thickness and the velocity of the material simultaneously by ultrasonic pulse-echo method using multi-direction probe. In the third stage, the velocity data and the boundary data are integrated to visualize the object. As the result, our method could visualize object shape within error rate of 6 %.