A Prototype System With Custom-Designed RX ICs for Contrast-Enhanced Ultrasound Imaging

IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2022 May;69(5):1649-1660. doi: 10.1109/TUFFC.2022.3161226. Epub 2022 Apr 27.

Abstract

This work presents a prototype system based on a multichannel receiving (RX) integrated circuit (IC) for contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS) imaging. The RX IC is implemented in a 40-nm low-voltage CMOS technology and is designed to interface to a capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer array. To enable a direct connection of the RX electronics to the transducer, an analog multiplexer with on-chip protection circuitry is developed. Stress tests confirm the reliability of this arrangement when combined with a high-voltage pulser. The RX IC is equipped with a highly programmable bandpass filter to capture harmonic signals from ultrasound contrast agents (UCAs) while suppressing fundamental components. In order to examine the impact of analog front-end (AFE) bandpass filtering, in vitro acoustic experiments are performed with UCAs. A spatial resolution analysis suggests that the AFE bandpass filtering combined with a pulse inversion (PI) technique can improve the lateral resolution by 38% or 9% compared to the original full-bandwidth approach or a stand-alone PI approach, respectively, while the impact on axial resolution is negligible. A phantom study shows that compared to digital bandpass filtering, the AFE bandpass filtering enables better use of the dynamic range of the RX electronics, resulting in better generalized contrast-to-noise ratio from 0.44/0.53 to 0.57/0.68 without or with PI.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Equipment Design
  • Phantoms, Imaging
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Transducers*
  • Ultrasonography / methods