Wavelength switched fiber-optically controlled ultrasonic intracavity probes

It would be desirable to have ultrasonic energy control systems that, with minimal hardware change, operate over wide tunable and instantaneous bandwidths, such as required for the different ultrasonic medical modes. Today's mature fiber-optic (FO) technology could be used to develop low cost, high performance ultrasonic systems. Hence, recently, we have put forth the first proposal for the use of photonic beamforming for both narrowband and wideband ultrasonic arrays. In this paper, we propose a novel FO control system for intracavity ultrasonic probes, particularly for wide instantaneous bandwidth high resolution imaging.