High Frequency Ultrasound Imaging by Scanning a Single-element Transducer

Mechanical scanning of a single-element transducer and electronic scanning of an array transducer have been mostly utilized for high frequency ultrasound imaging. Considering that mechanical scanning systems are bulky and development of high frequency transducer arrays and their imaging systems are sophisticated and expensive, here we propose a novel approach, where a scanning forward-looking (FL) single-element transducer embedded in a steel pipe is driven by a tubular piezoelectric actuator, to get both B-scan and C-scan images. In the work, a positioning system composed of a two-dimensional position sensitive detector (PSD) is used to obtain the accurate information of the transducer position in real time. Ultrasonic signals and position information are acquired continuously while scanning the transducer across a tungsten wire phantom to reconstruct B-scan and C-scan images. The imaging performance of the scanning system is compared with traditional scanning imaging results. This work demonstrates that it is feasible and promising to obtain B-scan and C-scan high frequency ultrasound imaging by simply scanning a single-element transducer driven by a tubular piezoelectric actuator.