COMPOSITE TRANSDUCERS FOR MEDICAL ULTRASONICS

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The goal of this multidisciplinary collaborative program is to produce transducers for medical imaging that have lower insertion loss, broader bandwidth, better out-of-plane resolution, and greater depth of field than currently available. Our approach to achieving these goals is to design and construct transducers using novel ferroelectrics and new composite designs. Development of new ferroelectrics, their construction into composites, and evaluation of their imaging capabilities will be achieved using the combined expertise of five groups, Mayo Ultrasound Research Laboratory, Honeywell Ceramics Center (consulting with Ceramic Process System Corporation), and Echo ultrasound (in consultation with a professor at Penn State University). This team approach is devised to increase feed back, optimize efficiency of innovation, and shorten the time for results to become available to the imaging community. The Ceramics Center will produce novel piezoceramics such as relaxor ferroelectrics and antiferroelectrics which have desirable properties for medical imaging transducers. Echo Ultrasound will fabricate these special ceramics into composite transducers with optimal characteristics for medical imaging. The Mayo ultrasound group will test the imaging capabilities of the resulting transducers, design and investigate new transducers that produce nondiffracting beams, and guide and coordinate the efforts of the team Timely public disclosure of the results is assured by the fact that the principal investigator is in an academic environment. This program represents an opportunity for NIH to bring together experts who otherwise would not ordinarily collaborate on the design and construction of ultrasonic transducers for medical imaging.