A new kind of Ultrasound transducer, applied in ultrasound scanners was fabricated by Engineers at the University of British Columbia. So, what’s different about this one? Well, for starters it is made up of a type of polymer resin called polyCMUTs and it cuts down the costs of ultrasound scanners to as little as $100. A transducer converts the Ultrasound into the digital images displayed on the screen. The conventional transducers are fabricated from piezoelectric crystals, which are a special type of materials that can generate electrical current when a mechanical force is applied to it. These are employed very commonly in sensors that are used to detect minute changes in pressure, temperature, acceleration, and other mechanical forces. PolyCMUTs have a few advantages over the piezoelectric materials such as easy to fabricate, allows for larger bandwidth and better integration with electronics. Not only that, but manufacturing polymer resin is really simple when compared to piezoelectric crystals, which makes up for the low overall cost of the scanners.
The piezoelectric drums present within the transducer are manufactured from rigid silicon materials, which require an expensive process, performed within a controlled environment. The resin requires minimum number of steps for processing and also lesser equipments. The team tested their technology using a 64-element polyCMUT array to form an image of 12 aluminum wires immersed in a tank full of mineral oil. The image formed using the PolyCMUT transducer, showed all of the wires down to a depth if 85 mm. These wires were present at varying depths and for the first five wires at a depth of 50mm were revealed with a lateral resolution better than 1.5 mm at full-width at half-maximum.
Upon comparison of the sonograms formed by the piezoelectric transducers with the lab tested polyCMUT ones, the researchers were pleased to see that the images were sharper with the polyCMUT transducers. In addition, PolyCMUT transducer requires only 10 volts to operate, meaning it can be powered by a smartphone and that allows the device to be portable and useful especially in areas with power shortages. The probe used can also be modified in various shapes due to the flexibility offered by the polymers material, maybe even built into a flexible material that can be wrapped around the body for easier and better scanning at several different angles.
The device can eventually be miniaturized to a tiny size to move through blood vessels and scanning the body internally or it can be implanted near the heart for continuous monitoring, this is the possibility it offers for the future.
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