Facilities

The Ultrasound Research Laboratory

consists of five research areas of over 1,400 square feet. There are also a computer drop-in center, a library, and an office supply room totaling additional 700 square feet. The ultrasound group has seven personnel offices totaling 1,000 square feet located on the same floor as the Ultrasound Research Laboratory. All offices are equipped with desks, chairs, file cabinets, phones, personal computers, and high speed internet connection. Complete microprocessor design and programming capabilities are available. The most important assets of our laboratory are the people. We have a full-time system analyst/programmer, an engineer who designs analog and digital high-frequency circuitry, one consultant, one senior associate consultant, two associate consultants, two research associates, two postdoctoral fellows, and three graduate students. The Ultrasound Research Laboratory has the following facility/equipment.

Anechoic Chamber

We have a 12×10×7’ anechoic chamber with 15 Hz cutoff frequency in our laboratory funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. We conduct some of our low-level sound and vibration experiments in this room. We also do vibro-acoustography on patients in this room.

Scanning Laser Vibrometer

(VibraScan PSV-300-F, Polytec PI, Inc.) This system is for dynamic measurement of vibration of an object, and produces an image representing velocity distribution. Displacement on the order of one Angstrom can be measured by the system. This system was purchased under a National Science Foundation instrumentation grant.

Acoustic-optic Measurement System

Originally purchased as an optic system, we have completely rebuilt the system to obtain quantitative measurements of ultrasound fields. The system can be used to obtain data for tomography of ultrasound fields. The system currently can image about 3-5 cm of acoustic field.

Clinical Ultrasound Scanner

We have a new GE Vingmed Vivid 7 and an Acuson 128 XP scanner in the laboratory for use in research. Also available to our group is an Acuson Sequoia, an ATL HDT, an HP 2500, and a Hitachi ColorView 860.

Research Scanner

The laboratory has several water tank ultrasound scanners, which are capable of scanning with multiple combinations of transmitter and receiver transducers in a multitude of scan geometries, including parallel and fan beam geometries as well as raster transmission or reflection C-scans. The scanners are configured in such a way as to be capable of scanning either excised tissues and phantoms or live animals including humans.

Modular Instrumentation

Many types of signal processing modules are available to the laboratory research scanner, such as continuous wave signal generation and analysis modules and analysis circuits for quadrature detection, time integration, and synchronous detection methods. We have eight function generators, one polynomial waveform synthesizer, two lock-in amplifiers, two digital oscilloscopes, two analog oscilloscopes, and two high speed dual channel A/D systems. A variety of ultrasound transducers and associated power amplifiers and receivers are also available in addition to various commercial phantoms and homemade phantoms.

Computer

Mayo has high-powered compute engines/clusters and an IT consulting resource available to our use if necessary. Our laboratory is equipped with a network of one central file server, 4 Sun Ray systems, 22 PCs, and 4 laptop computers, all connected with high speed internet. Operating systems include Sun Solaris 8, HP-UX 11i, and Microsoft Windows XP. A list of our major software packages is: Abacus 6.4-1, LMS Sysnoise 5.6, CyberLogic Wave3000, Mathematica 4.0, MatLab 7.5, LabVIEW 8.5, Mathcad 11, Mayo Analyze 7.0, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. Data in every computer are backed up everyday to external hard drives, archived every week automatically, and also stored by individual investigators on DVDs or CD-ROMs. The Finite Facilities Page 9 Principal Investigator/Program Director (Last, first, middle): Greenleaf, James, F Element/Finite Boundary simulation package (LMS Sysnoise) is installed on a high speed HP computer dedicated to simulation of structural vibration.