A Novel Biomedical Ultrasonic and Impedance Imaging System

In this paper, we propose an imaging technique which can create both an ultrasonography and an impedance tomography by using the data collected by only one set of transducers. This enables the identification of two completely different sets of properties of a target by the data collected through the same set of transducers, at the same time. The novelty of the proposed system is, piezoelectric transducers which are generally used for ultrasonography is used for both ultrasonography and impedance tomography. In the experiments conducted, we established an ultrasonic and impedance imaging system of sixteen piezoelectric transducers and measured the propagation time and electrical voltage for imaging. We also demonstrate that this system has the ability to detect changes in concentration or changes in position of the target imaging object.