Patent ID: 9274088
Filing Date: 2016-03-01
CPC Classification: A61B,G01N,G01S

Claim Text:
1. A multi-dimensional transducer for medical diagnostic ultrasound imaging, the transducer comprising: a switching layer having a plurality of switch cells, each cell including at least one lateral switch for connecting to an adjacent cell and at least one vertical switch for connecting to an acoustic element; and an acoustic element layer having a plurality of the acoustic elements, the acoustic element layer stacked along a depth dimension with the switching layer, the acoustic elements comprising individual physical transduction devices separate from each other regardless of electrical connection; wherein the acoustic elements of the acoustic element layer and the corresponding individual physical transduction devices separate from each other regardless of electrical connection have a finer pitch in a direction orthogonal to the depth dimension than a pitch of the switch cells of the switch layer, resulting in a difference in physical pitch along the orthogonal direction within a face region of the acoustic elements, wherein a subset of the switches connect some of the acoustic elements to different beamformer channels, and wherein the difference in pitch provides for selection of most of the acoustic elements where some acoustic elements are deselected due to the difference in pitch of the switching layer and acoustic element layer in the stack along the depth dimension resulting in all of the switching cells being unavailable for the deselected some of the acoustic elements.