Real-time three dimensional data acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) echocardiography may introduce a new dimension to existing possibilities of cardiac imaging. Currently, off-line 3D techniques, based on ECG-triggered acquisition of a large series of 2D images using standard sector scanners are commonly used. Clinical usefulness can be only proven if 3D-acquisition can be performed real-time and reconstruction can be done real-time or within a few seconds. For real-time data-acquisition approaches are electronic scanning using 2D (sparse) arrays or fast mechanical rotating of a 1D array. In this study the feasibility of a mechanical real-time 3D data acquisition with a fast rotating scanning unit is studied. The fast rotating 3D scanning unit is based on a 64 elements, 3.75 MHz phased array transducer. The transducer is rotational mounted in a TTE scanning device. To perform real-time 3D acquisition, the transducer is continuously rotating around its central axis, resulting in a conical 3D data set. The rotation speed is eight rotations per second resulting in sixteen 3D data sets per second. The probe is interfaced to a commercially available 2D imaging system. The sector angle, number of lines per sector, scanning depth, the number of parallel beam formers and the rotation speed determine the time and spatial resolution. After the real-time acquisition 3D reconstruction takes less than four seconds.