Ultrafast Orthogonal Row-Column Electronic Scanning (uFORCES) with Bias-Switchable Top-Orthogonal-to-Bottom Electrode 2D Arrays

Top-orthogonal-to-bottom electrode (TOBE) arrays, also known as row-column arrays, have shown great promise as an alternative to fully-wired 2D arrays, owing to a considerable reduction in channels. Novel imaging schemes with bias-switchable TOBE arrays were previously shown to offer promise compared to previous non-bias-switchable row-column imaging schemes and compared to previously-developed Explososcan methods, however, they required significant coherent compounding. Here we introduce Ultra-Fast Orthogonal Row-Column Electronic Scanning (uFORCES), an ultrafast coded synthetic aperture imaging method. Unlike its FORCES predecessor, uFORCES can achieve coherent compounding with only a few transmit events and may thus be more robust to tissue motion. We demonstrate through simulations that uFORCES can potentially offer improved resolution compared to the matrix probes having beamformers constrained by the paraxial approximation. Also, unlike current matrix probe technology incorporating microbeamforming, uFORCES with bias-switchable TOBE arrays can achieve ultrafast imaging at thousands of frames per second using only row- and column addressing. We also demonstrate experimental implementation of uFORCES using a fabricated 128×128 electrostrictive TOBE array on a crossed 25 µm gold wire phantom and a tissue mimicking phantom. The potential for improved resolution and ultrafast imaging with uFORCES could enable new essential imaging capabilities for clinical and pre-clinical ultrasound.