PolyCMUTs: a new ultrasound transducer technology for medical imaging

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The ultrasound field is being disrupted by the advent of a new transducer technology. The traditional transducer technology is based on the piezoelectric principle to convert electricity into ultrasound and vice versa. This is a mature technology that has enabled many clinical applications for ultrasound making it the most frequently used medical imaging modality. Unfortunately, piezoelectric-based transducers are limited by the nature of these piezoelectric "crystals" meaning that even the newest smart-phone connected transducers are still hand-held, expensive and have low-volume manufacturing. Moreover, they need experts to perform manual operation and interpretation. The disruption is coming from CMUTs (Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasound Transducers) that replace the crystals with tiny microfabricated drums that are integrated tightly and made together with electronics on chips. CMUTs are disruptive because they offer huge advantages in cost through high-volume manufacturing but also advantages in quality and the ability to create affordable transducers suitable for 3D imaging. At UBC, we invented a highly innovative CMUT made from soft polymers, hence called polyCMUT. What is exciting is that our polyCMUTs have all these advantages plus they can be flexible, large, transparent, and an even better cost-performance ratio by using agile manufacturing facilities. These unique capabilities will be used in our first beachhead product: a new 3D imaging transducer that is both affordable and suitable for detecting many diseases and disorders. Adding to the disruption is the advent of AI to enhance the operation, analysis and decision making. The combination of cloud-connected polyCMUTs and AI can also open up ultrasound to new users and new applications. One long-term goal is improving breast cancer detection. We propose to effectively double the imaging capability of breast cancer imaging by adding our polyCMUT imaging to mammography within the same examination. This would improve cancer detection and patient outcomes. In general, the expanded use of ultrasound using our polyCMUT products will have an impact on the detection of multiple diseases and on the lives of many Canadians.