Development of a high-frequency ultrasound system for high speed image scanning

High-frequency image technique has been widely applied to medical diagnoses recently. As high voltage protection, high speed stage and trigger control circuitry are difficult to implement a high frequency ultrasound imaging system. In this study, we utilized a linear servo with high noise tolerance and a novel multi-depth expression method to overcome those issues in developed high speed image system. B-mode image of the chicken phantom by 25MHz transducer shows the resolution of lateral and axial resolutions are up to 123μm and 59μm respectively. In addition, the experiment demonstrates that the axial resolution and depth of field (DOF) can be improved by time gain compensation (TGC) and multi-depth method. The results indicated that the proposed system could achieve over 24 fps for 1mm scan distance and 100 lines per frame. In the future, the developed system is potential for other clinical applications such as ophthalmology and dermatology.