A Tool For Education

Verasonics delivers ultrasound systems that are highly programmable for data acquisition and processing and designed to facilitate research and development of new biomedical ultrasound imaging and therapy techniques, research into the properties of materials and non-destructive evaluation/testing (NDT/NDE).

In contrast to conventional commercial ultrasound systems, digitized RF data from each individual transducer element is available to the developer. All beamforming and post-processing is done in software, and both the hardware data acquisition sequence and the host computer processing flow are programmable by the user using a MATLAB interface.

Because the systems are designed to be highly flexible, ultrasound systems by Verasonics can also be useful as a practical tool in teaching acoustic wave physics, transducer and array evaluation, and data processing concepts, using benchtop scale homemade acoustic and elastic media, including flow models. For script evaluation and testing, the system includes a hardware simulator that uses a simple point scatterer numerical model to compute RF backscatter data. RF data can also be recorded during a hardware acquisition, and then reprocessed using different user-developed algorithms for comparative study. Additionally, since the system is easy to learn, many fundamental concepts can be explored in a laboratory setting, using scattering media or custom transducers fabricated as part of the student’s experimental plan. The system enables sophisticated hands-on experience with acoustics beyond the numerical world.