Design of a sparse ellipsoidal array for volumetric ultrasound imaging of the prostate

Volumetric transperineal imaging has the potential to improve motion management for external beam radiotherapy of the prostate. A fully wired, dense 2D array and a system to control such a probe is costly and not generally clinically available. Therefore, a bespoke sparse ellipsoidal array with 256 elements is proposed, allowing the use of standard ultrasound frontends for larger aperture. Based on simulated performance metrics, the array was selected from a population of potential configurations differing in element size, aperture size and ellipse eccentricity. Simulated B-Modes of the selected configuration were then compared to a dense array, which it outperformed in terms of FWHM and generalized Contrast-to-Noise ratio.