Modular Large Array for Liver Cancer Imaging in Handheld Form Factor

Hepatocellular carcinoma is difficult to diagnose reliably using ultrasound in patients with thick abdominal walls. An important consideration for improving diagnosis in these patients is increased contrast to noise resolution (CNR) which is directly dependent on elevation focus and can be improved by using a large electronically scanned elevational aperture. Here we present recent work integrating ASIC electronics modules with a large area 64 × 16 element 1.75D acoustic array module. The pitch of the acoustic array is 650 µm in azimuth and 1000 µm in elevation, with a 2.4 MHz center frequency. The total size of the aperture is 42 mm × 16 mm. The acoustic response with the ASIC modules benefitted from an improvement in normalized sensitivity of + 12dB, and an increase in the Fractional Bandwidth (FBW) of 3% (0.85 to 0.88). The ASICs and modules provide a framework for academic-industry partnership for development of extended aperture probes with arbitrary geometries.