Regulations and System Specifications

Abstract

Ultrasound standards already exist for medical applications as imaging, diagnosis, and therapy. Hence, it is recommended for novel applications to make analogies with similar systems in order to define user requirements (e.g. weight and size of the medical device) and test procedures (e.g. in-vitro, in-vivo). In addition, different organizations give directions for ultrasound use to avoid potential injuries due to thermal (e.g. energy is converted into heat) and mechanical bioeffects (e.g. cavitation). In this chapter exposure limits to ultrasound for human tissues (e.g. cardiac) are introduced so that system specifications (e.g. operating frequency and transducers selection) can be derived.