Experimental study of dual-ring CMUT array optimization for forward-looking IVUS

Forward-looking (FL) catheters have guiding and volumetric imaging capacities which are highly desirable for IVUS applications. Large channel and firing counts have to be reduced to enable 3-D real-time imaging and simplify front-end electronics. Recently, we have proposed an optimization procedure for dual ring FL arrays which is based on finding an optimal coarray set using the simulated annealing algorithm. The presented algorithm is based on finding a predefined number of optimal firing set which results in elimination of redundant spatial frequencies in the coarray. In this study, we present the experimental demonstration of the proposed method with fabricated single chip CMUT on CMOS system based FL dual ring arrays. The dual ring CMUT arrays were monolithically fabricated on top of CMOS chips which have 25-V pulsers and low-noise transimpedance amplifiers for each transmit and receive array elements. The fabricated CMUT arrays have 56 transmit and 48 receive elements operating at 12 MHz with a 1.4 mm outer diameter. To test the imaging performance of the optimal reduced set, we obtained a 512-element coarray set from the full 2688-element set. In the experiment, we used a phantom of 100-μm aluminium wires immersed in oil tank. We have reconstructed both 2-D PSFs and B-scan images of wire targets. Experimental results demonstrate that the simulated annealing based optimal firing set achieves acceptable lateral and contrast resolution performances with 1/5 of the full set.