Preliminary Demonstration of Pulse-Echo Imaging With a Long Monolithic Flexible CMUT Array
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conformal ultrasound imaging using large-area transducer arrays is an emerging technology with significant potential for real-time, continuous, functional, and health monitoring applications. This study addresses the challenge of fabricating such transducer arrays by presenting the development and preliminary imaging performance of a monolithic flexible capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) array—the longest reported to date. A 128-element, 91 mm long flexible array was designed and fabricated using a lithography process, with SU-8 CMUT structures on a bendable polyimide substrate. The array was then packaged by mounting it onto a flexible printed circuit board and coated with a thin polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) layer for in vivo testing. Electrical impedance measurements confirmed the full functionality of all transducer elements, with an average center resonant frequency of 5.84 MHz (SD: 0.14 MHz). Pulse-echo imaging experiments demonstrated the array’s capability to detect specular reflections and resolve fine features under various curvatures. In vivo scans revealed outlines of a finger and superficial tissues in the forearm. Despite the limitations associated with the lack of custom front-end electronics and low signal-to-noise ratio beamforming strategies, this work demonstrates the feasibility of manufacturing a flexible CMUT array suitable for large-area conformal sonography.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".