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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Title: Single-Chip Reduced-Wire Active Catheter System with Programmable Transmit Beamforming and Receive Time-Division Multiplexing for Intracardiac Echocardiography
Committee:
Dr. Levent Degertekin, Advisor, ECE
Dr. Stanislav Emelianov, ECE
Dr. Farrokh Ayazi, ECE
Dr. Omer Inan, ECE
Dr. Coskun Tekes, ME
Abstract: The main objective of proposed thesis research is to develop a single chip reduced-wire active catheter system, which adopts programmable transmit beamforming and receive time-division multiplexing (TDM). The proposed front-end application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is designed for driving a 64-channel 1-D piezo-transducer array or capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducer (CMUT) array in intracardiac echocardiography (ICE) catheters.
ICE has become more important clinical modality in interventional ultrasound imaging. It requires a minimal invasive procedure during which a small catheter is placed into a femoral vein to image the heart anatomy from inside. It provides real-time ultrasound imaging, guiding interventions like valve repair, placement of stents, closure of atrial septal defects (ASD) and catheter-based ablation to treat atrial fibrillation. ICE needs local anesthesia and the sedation and it is becoming the preferred imaging tool with better image quality over transesophageal echography (TEE) which requires general anesthesia delivered by an anesthesiologist.
Current ICE catheters offer a limited 2-D or 3-D field of view in spite of large number electrical interconnections to the main imaging system, which are mainly determined by the number of array elements and ground connections. Each element in the ICE array is connected to corresponding analog-front-end (AFE) system with a separate long wire, which is a significant limitation for improving image quality and increasing the number of elements. Also, in order to use ICE catheters under MRI instead of the ionizing X-ray radiation-based angiography, the number of interconnect wires in the catheter should be minimized to reduce RF-induced heating from metal connection. Furthermore, reducing the number of wires would improve the flexibility, reach, and even lower the cost of the single-use ICE catheters. Therefore, an interconnection reduction method which integrates electronics in the catheter tip would have a significant impact in the catheter-based ultrasound imaging applications.
