2D Transducer Array for High-Speed 3D Imaging System

3D imaging system was developed utilizing a combination of sparse 2D arrays, the synthetic aperture focusing technique, and coded excitation of a solution for high-speed 3D ultrasound imaging, since it could formulate multiple transmitting beams as well as receiving beams with a minimum number of transmissions. A 40 × 40 array of PZT elements was fabricated with a conventional dice-and-fill process (each element: 2MHz, 1mm × 1mm). 3D images were successfully obtained for the standard ultrasound phantoms with 32 transmitters and 128 receivers. It is shown that the combination of the 2D array and the coded wavefront method is applicable in medical diagnosis.