Acoustic focusing to the waveguides utilizing double parabolic reflectors

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging transducers possess serious trade-off design in performances between the penetration depth and the imaging resolution, which loses detection accuracy of diseases in large and deep-depth organs. To ease this problem, this study combines a piezoelectric transducer with the waveguide technique to realize invasive imaging. However, conventional configurations with waveguides suffer from low input energy or low energy transmission efficiency, thus leading to the proposal of the double-parabolic-reflector focusing and guiding mechanism to achieve high power transmission. In this letter, three different physical configurations of waveguides for ultrasound propagation are compared in terms of acoustic pressure, power, and propagation modes. The proposed mechanism with double parabolic reflectors enhances the acoustic pressure at the tip of the cylindrical waveguide to over 17 times compared to the conventional mechanism and increases the total power flow to around 213 times. Due to the superior performances in powerful ultrasound transmission, the proposal is expected to widen the applications in ultrasound imaging, ultrasound therapeutics, and ultrasound microscopy.