Sewify Ahmed, Antico Maria, Alzubaidi Laith, Alwzwazy Haider A, Roots Jacqueline, Pivonka Peter, Fontanarosa Davide
School of Clinical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, Gardens Point Campus, 2 George St., Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia.
Centre for Biomedical Technologies (CBT), Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD 4000, Australia.
Sensors (Basel). 2025 Apr 2;25(7):2245. doi: 10.3390/s25072245.
An emerging alternative to conventional piezoelectric technologies, which continue to dominate the ultrasound medical imaging (US) market, is Capacitive Micromachined Ultrasonic Transducers (CMUTs). Ultrasound transducers based on this technology offer a wider frequency bandwidth, improved cost-effectiveness, miniaturized size and effective integration with electronics. These features have led to an increase in the commercialization of CMUTs in the last 10 years. We conducted a review to answer three main research questions: (1) What are the commercially available CMUT-based clinical sonographic devices in the medical imaging space? (2) What are the medical imaging applications of these devices? (3) What is the performance of the devices in these applications? We additionally reported on all the future work expressed by modern studies released in the past 2 years to predict the trend of development in future CMUT device developments and express gaps in current research. The search retrieved 19 commercially available sonographic CMUT products belonging to seven companies. Four of the products were clinically approved. Sonographic CMUT devices have established their niche in the medical US imaging market mainly through the Butterfly iQ and iQ+ for quick preliminary screening, emergency care in resource-limited settings, clinical training, teleguidance, and paramedical applications. There were no commercialized 3D CMUT probes.
电容式微机械超声换能器（CMUT）是传统压电技术的一种新兴替代方案，传统压电技术在超声医学成像（US）市场仍占据主导地位。基于该技术的超声换能器具有更宽的频率带宽、更高的性价比、更小的尺寸以及与电子设备的有效集成。这些特性使得CMUT在过去十年中的商业化程度有所提高。我们进行了一项综述，以回答三个主要研究问题：（1）医学成像领域有哪些基于CMUT的商用临床超声设备？（2）这些设备的医学成像应用有哪些？（3）这些设备在这些应用中的性能如何？我们还报告了过去两年发布的现代研究中提出的所有未来工作，以预测未来CMUT设备发展的趋势，并指出当前研究中的差距。检索到19种属于7家公司的商用超声CMUT产品。其中4种产品已获得临床批准。超声CMUT设备主要通过Butterfly iQ和iQ+在医学超声成像市场中占据了一席之地，用于快速初步筛查、资源有限环境下的急救、临床培训、远程指导和辅助医疗应用。目前尚无商业化的3D CMUT探头。
