Beamforming and Signal Processing
Dr Steven Neale, Dr Martin Lavery, Prof Sandy Cochran
Focussed beams of ultrasound can be used to move microscopic objects without touch. This enables the fine control of these object and can be used to fabricate circuitry and other micro-scale devices as well as manipulating biologicial materials without altering them for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. More details can be found at the Micromanipulation Group website.
An area of significant development is seeing where optical techniques can be applied to ultrasound. This may require the fabrication of the acoustic equivalent of lenses, and so on, in new materials and with novel designs that advances in 3D printing have made possible. This is leading to new possibilities in communications and imaging uses for ultrasound.
New imaging systems and techniques require development of signal processing methods to extract the best information from the sensor data. Research is ongoing into using techniques used in RADAR, for example, in the medical imaging domain.