When you want to make a project small you might grab an Arduino Pro Mini instead of a full sized Arduino board but what if your project needs to fit into a blood vessel? F. Levent Degertekin, a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology is developing some miniature technology that will revolutionize how medical doctors will look at the heart and blood vessels.
Via: Electronics Lab
“The device integrates ultrasound transducers with processing electronics on a single 1.4 millimeter silicon chip. On-chip processing of signals allows data from more than a hundred elements on the device to be transmitted using just 13 tiny cables, permitting it to easily travel through circuitous blood vessels. The forward-looking images produced by the device would provide significantly more information than existing cross-sectional ultrasound.
The dual-ring array includes 56 ultrasound transmit elements and 48 receive elements. When assembled, the donut-shaped array is just 1.5 millimeters in diameter, with a 430-micron center hole to accommodate a guide wire.”
