大東 弘二

Hiroji OHIGASHI

東レ㈱エンジニアリング研究所

Basic Research Laboratories, Toray Industries, Inc.

キーワード :

Polyvinylidene fluoride, a most promising piezoelectric polymer at present, has the unique advantages as ultrasonic transducer material - low acoustic impedance, flexibility and low dielectric permeability. This enables us to provide transducers having high resolution power for ultrasound imaging. In this paper, state-of-art in piezoelectric polymer transducers for medical ultrasound imaging are reviewed. Single element PVDF concave transducers (3.5 - 7.5MHz, 1/2 - 1 inch aperture) have been developed and proved to give higher quality images compared with conventional ceramic transducers. Potential application to linear array and more elaborated transducers, and the limitation of piezoelectric polymers are discussed.