A portable, low-cost, highly integrated, 3D medical ultrasound system

A design is presented, with prototype component experimental results, of a portable, low-cost 3D ultrasound system that utilizes innovative integrated circuit (IC) topologies and beamforming algorithms to condense the beamforming process into a small custom IC coupled with a generic, commercially available DSP chip. Furthermore, the system includes a low-cost, fully sampled 2D transducer array placed directly adjacent to the receive circuitry allowing precise impedance matching and improved SNR.