Flexible large-area ultrasound arrays for medical applications made using embossed polymer structures.

With the huge progress in micro-electronics and artificial intelligence, the ultrasound probe has become the bottleneck in further adoption of ultrasound beyond the clinical setting (e.g. home and monitoring applications). Today, ultrasound transducers have a small aperture, are bulky, contain lead and are expensive to fabricate. Furthermore, they are rigid, which limits their integration into flexible skin patches. New ways to fabricate flexible ultrasound patches have therefore attracted much attention recently. First prototypes typically use the same lead-containing piezo-electric materials, and are made using micro-assembly of rigid active components on plastic or rubber-like substrates. We present an ultrasound transducer-on-foil technology based on thermal embossing of a piezoelectric polymer. High-quality two-dimensional ultrasound images of a tissue mimicking phantom are obtained. Mechanical flexibility and effective area scalability of the transducer are demonstrated by functional integration into an endoscope probe with a small radius of 3 mm and a large area (91.2×14 mm2) non-invasive blood pressure sensor.

Acoustic ship signature measurements by cross-correlation method.

Cross-correlation methods were applied for the estimation of the power spectral density and modulation spectrum of underwater noise generated by moving vessels. The cross-correlation of the signal from two hydrophones allows the separation of vessel acoustic signatures in a busy estuary. Experimental data recorded in the Hudson River are used for demonstration that cross-correlation method measured the same ship noise and ship noise modulation spectra as conventional methods. The cross-correlation method was then applied for the separation of the acoustic signatures of two ships present simultaneously. Presented methods can be useful for ship traffic monitoring and small ship classification, even in noisy harbor environments.

Time-reversal acoustic focusing system as a virtual random phased array.

This paper compares the performance of two different systems for dynamic focusing of ultrasonic waves: conventional 2-D phased arrays (PA) and a focusing system based on the principles of time-reversed acoustics (TRA). Focused ultrasound fields obtained in the experiments with the TRA focusing system (TRA FS), which employs a liquid-filled reverberator with 4 piezotransducers attached to its wall, are compared with the focused fields obtained by mathematical simulation of PAs comprised from several tens to several hundreds of elements distributed randomly on the array surface. The experimental and simulated focusing systems had the same aperture and operated at a frequency centered about 600 kHz. Experimental results demonstrated that the TRA FS with a small number of channels can produce complex focused patterns and can steer them with efficiency comparable to that of a PA with hundreds of elements. It is shown that the TRA FS can be realized using an extremely simple means, such as a reverberator made of a water-filled plastic bottle with just a few piezotransducers attached to its walls.

Wideband nonlinear time reversal seismo-acoustic method for landmine detection.

Acoustic and seismic waves provide a method to localize compliant mines by vibrating the top plate and a thin soil layer above the mine. This vibration is mostly linear, but also includes a small nonlinear deviation. The main goal of this paper is to introduce a method of processing that uses phase-inversion to observe nonlinear effects in a wide frequency band. The method extracts a nonlinear part of surface velocity from two similar broadcast signals of opposite sign by summing and cancelling the linear components and leaving the nonlinear components. This phase-inversion method is combined with time reversal focusing to provide increased seismic vibration and enhance the nonlinear effect. The experiments used six loudspeakers in a wood box placed over sand in which inert landmines were buried. The nonlinear surface velocity of the sand with a mine compared to the sand without a mine was greater as compared to a linear technique.