Transducer Module Development for an Open-Source Ultrasound Tomography System

Researchers in the Ultrasound Tomography community face a high barrier to entry, due to the high cost and lead times associated with custom transducer arrays. For this work, 16-element linear array transducer modules have been developed for an open-source, low-cost, ring array with low interelement variation. A module prototype was characterised using a hydrophone to measure the pressure field from each element, and the transmit frequency response. The measured average elevation and lateral plane skews were 0.41° and 2.07°, the elevation beamwidth was 8.1 mm ± 0.23 mm, and after normalisation the standard deviation in transmit amplitude spectrum between elements was 8%, averaged across all frequencies. The low interelement variation in these parameters suggests that an ideal transducer model could be used to represent the elements during image reconstruction, which could be based on measurements from only a subset of elements, simplifying preliminary UST work for end users.