Application of integrated electronics to ultrasonic medical instruments

During the past decade, ultrasonic medical diagnostic instruments have advanced significantly as a result of the resourceful application of electronic-system and acoustic-transducer designs to the problem of noninvasive information acquisition from clinical patients. These advancements are reviewed, with emphasis on the electronic technology by which they were achieved. Current instruments that enable imaging through real-time scanning and gray-scale display are described. It is predicted that future ultrasonic diagnostic instruments will be based on increasingly sophisticated integrated electronic technology that should greatly enhance the imaging performance of these systems; it should also provide the foundation for ultrasonic imaging instruments that will extend the state of the art in quantitative analysis and diagnosis through doppler processing. This growing technology most likely will include 1) high-current DMOS multiplexer transmit/ receive switches, 2) precision preamplifier array circuits, 3) advanced beamsteer/focus delay lines, 4) multielement integrated transducer arrays, and 5) Doppler-processing integrated circuits.