Transducers, Imaging Systems and Image Formation

While focusing on medical imaging applications, this chapter introduces the fundamental aspects of ultrasonic transducers such as the operating principles, the most common transducer configurations and the main performance parameters. It illustrates well-established technologies currently used for medical transducer fabrication, as well as the emerging, cutting-edge technologies that are leading the way towards future generation imaging systems. The chapter describes novel transducer configurations that are enabling real-time volumetric imaging. Ultrasound research has made amazing strides in the last two decades due to several concurring factors. Firstly, the quality of transducer arrays has considerably improved. Finally, the availability of powerful parallel processing engines from field programmable gate arrays and graphic processing units technologies has enabled the real-time implementation of computationally intensive methods that would have been impossible a few years ago.