MECHANICALLY SCANNED THREE-DIMENSIONAL ULTRASOUND IMAGING ADAPTED TO THE CONTOURS OF A BODY

摘要

The present invention relates to mechanically scanning an array of transducer elements (26) over the patient's body (12) and a volume (86) to be examined, respectively. In order to maintain tight contact between the volume (86) and the transducer array (26), there is proposed a transducer array (26) which follows the contours of the patient's body (12) while recording the movement of the array in the z-direction. This allows for a 3D reconstruction of the scanned image.