Miniaturized circular array [for intravascular ultrasound]

Intravascular ultrasound demands miniature transducers that can be guided through tiny blood vessels. Other applications in medicine and industry can also benefit from a highly miniaturized catheter based transducer design. The smaller the geometry the more useful and versatile the resulting device will be. Design consideration of geometry versus performance tradeoffs, other acoustic properties in array design and the methods of synthetic aperture beamforming are well known. Therefore, we have focused our paper on the details and intricacies of manufacturing extremely small ultrasound arrays.