An acoustic lens based ultrasound imaging camera

In this paper, we have proposed and validated through computer simulation and experiment, an acoustic lens based focusing idea for ultrasound (US) imaging that eliminates synthetic aperture focusing typically used in conventional US imaging systems. The goal of the project is to incorporate US imaging functionality into our existing photoacoustic (PA) imaging probe in order to produce a dual-mode imaging camera. A Polyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) film located on and perpendicular to the lens axis is used as an US plane wave generator. The propagating ultrasound plane wave is backscattered by the target first and gets focused by the acoustic lens afterwards onto a 16-channel linear transducer array. A linear frequency modulated (chirp) signal is used for signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) enhancement. We simulate our acoustic lens based imaging system using our custom-designed lens evaluation package and test the preliminary system performance through a prototype imaging camera. Clear lens-focused images are observed in both simulation and experiments with a dramatic SNR improvement.