We are excited to announce the arrival of Landwind's latest offering - the brand new CU50. At only a £500 + VAT step up from its predecessor, the C40, the CU50 certainly offers a huge leap in style and performance. Click here to learn more about the CU50, and read our jargon-buster below to help make sense of the improvements.

• Digital Beam-forming

Digital beam former: The part of an ultrasound instrument that steers and focuses the ultrasound beam. When introduced in the 1970s, beam forming was an entirely analogue process. During the 1990s, digital beam forming was introduced. The electrical signals generated in the transducer elements by the ultrasound echoes are still analogue, and they are first amplified in an analogue circuit, the radiofrequency (RF) amplifier. Many manufacturers also introduce time-gain compensation (TGC) at this analogue stage, but then signals from each element may be digitised in an analogue-to-digital converter (ADC), and thereafter beam forming may be all digital. In addition to acting as a dynamic acoustic lens, the beam former may also determine the transmit and receive center frequency and bandwidth.

• Dynamic Receiving Focusing

Dynamic Receive Focus automatically provides a continuous receive focus throughout the entire field of view. By continuously optimising receive delays, aperture size and frequency content, Dynamic Receive Focus creates a more accurate acoustic lens. The result is a remarkable improvement in axial and lateral resolution.

• Dynamic Frequency Scanning

Automatically improves resolution and penetration simultaneously. Highly damped transducers seek to improve image quality and system resolution. Damping transducer vibration to improve axial resolution changes the bandwidth, or the range of frequencies transmitted. The greater the damping, the wider the range of frequencies. Wide Bandwidth Transducers typically transmit a range of higher and lower frequencies that spans at least 60% of the center operating frequency (COF). As the body's tissues  naturally absorb higher ultrasonic frequencies faster than lower frequencies, Wide Bandwidth Transducers automatically provide the optimum frequency needed to image in both the near and far fields.

• Real-time Dynamic Aperture

Dynamic Aperture automatically functions on received signals to remove beam focusing artefacts. Multi-element focusing forms a curved wave front to focus the ultrasound beam. The diameter of this wave front is the effective transducer aperture. Ultrasound systems automatically match the precise number of working transducer elements to the focal zone range to keep the beam intensity constant. Dynamic Aperture produces a uniform beam regardless of the focal zone position, removing image artefacts due to uneven focusing.

• Dynamic Receiving Apodization

Transducer arrays perform sampling in the spatial domain so, as with any sampled data system, steps must be taken to control aliasing effects. Side lobes (or grating lobes when referring to an array) on either side of the main beam can cause image artifacts. Strong reflectors in the beam’s side lobe region can interfere with the receiving of echoes from the targets in the main on-axis beam. Just as time-domain sampling uses an anti-aliasing filter, spatial sampling employs a window function for weighting the transducer elements based on their position in the aperture. This process is called apodisation and is accomplished by exciting elements in the array with different voltage amplitudes. The window function used must be selected carefully as there is a tradeoff between the amplitude of the near-in side lobes and the width of the main beam which degrades image resolution. Lateral resolution of an ultrasound system improves as the array aperture decreases in the nearfield and as it increases in the farfield. Thus, as the focal point moves from the nearfield to the farfield, the array aperture is increased by switching on more elements. For optimal apodisation, the window function must be continuously scaled to the effective size of the growing aperture. This process is called dynamic apodisation.

• Multi-Beam image formation technology

Multi-Beam image Formation with Parallel Processing Digital signals are easily replicated and directed along multiple pathways, all of them processing the data simultaneously, in a unique way defined for each particular pathway. The ultrasound system is capable of forming multiple beams with parallel beamforming: two parallel beams in B-Mode. This ability translates to high frame rate imaging capability, critical for high performance image quality and for tissue image motion visualization. The Multi-Beam Image Formation Technology is fast and flexible, with the ability to create up to two tissue beams in "Dual B Mode" from each transmitted pulse.

Photo: From left to right, the Landwind CU50, Landwind C40, and (far right) TH80v.