Lecture by Professor Hervé Liebgott, Creatis/Biomedical Imaging Research Laboratory at University of Lyon
The aim of this talk is to present the work done at CREATIS, in collaboration with the University of Florence, to find the best configuration of a given number of active elements distributed on the active surface of a 2D probe in order to maximize their ability to produce images with homogeneous contrast and resolution over the entire scanned volume of interest.
This work presents the integration of realistic acoustic simulations using Field II performed in a stochastic optimization process (simulated annealing algorithm).
The proposed sparse array design framework is general enough to be applied on both on-grid (active elements located on a regular grid) and non-grid (arbitrary positioning of the active elements) arrays. The introduction of an innovative energy function sculpts the optimal 3D beam pattern radiated by the array.
The obtained optimized results have 128, 192 or 256 active elements to help their compatibility with currently commercialized ultrasound scanners, potentially allowing development of 3D ultrasound imaging with reasonable cost systems.