Method and apparatus for applying synthetic aperture focusing techniques to a catheter based system for high frequency ultrasound imaging of small vessels

摘要

A catheter based ultrasound imaging system is disclosed which is capable of providing images of coronary vessels at frequencies near 50 MHz. The catheter based system implements a Synthetic Aperture Focusing Technique (SAFT) by scanning through a miniature ultrasound transducer array to sequentially select and fully multiplex a subset of array elements to operate as a sub-aperture of the total synthetic aperture on each firing; thus reducing the number of required catheter interconnections. Each synthetic aperture array is dynamically and retrospectively focused to accommodate precision imaging at high frequency without conventional signal to noise losses.