Portable Ultrasound Data Acquisition System Design

Ultrasound is radiation-free, patient-friendly and less expensive when compared to other medical imaging techniques. Ultrasound scanning has the capability to image the organs in real time, thus offering quick diagnosis. Conventional medical ultrasound machines are not suited for remote health monitoring because of their large form factor and lack of trained sonographers limiting its use only to urban areas and well trained clinicians. This thesis discusses the implementation of portable ultrasound data acquisition system for Point of Care (POC) applications in both of the system-level Hardware and Firmware design level. In the Hardware design, we are targeting the compact able application as well as the extendable applications where the power, level of integration and the feasible of the replication are critical. The portable system architecture for 8-channel consists of ASICs for ultrasound and FPGA. Beam forming is the front end process to steer and focus the acoustic beam with in the region of interest for diagnosis

A Programmable Fpga-based 8-channel Arbitrary Waveform Generator For Medical Ultrasound Research Activities

In modern ultrasound imaging systems, digital transmit beamformer module typically generates accurate control of the amplitude of individual elements in a multielement array probe, as well as of the time delays and phase between them, to enable the acoustic beam to be focused and/or steered electronically. However, these systems do not provide the ultrasound researchers access to transmit front-end module. This paper presents the development of a digital transmit beamformer system for generating simultaneous arbitrary waveforms, specifically designed for research purposes. The proposed architecture has 8 independent excitation channels and uses an FPGA (Field Programmable Gated Array) device for electronic steering and focusing of ultrasound beam. The system allows operation in pulse-echo mode, with pulse repetition rate of excitation from 62.5 Hz to 8 kHz, center frequency from 500 kHz to 20 MHz, excitation voltage over 100 Vpp, and individual control of amplitude apodization, phase angle and time delay trigger. Experimental results show that this technique is suitable for generating the excitation waveforms needed for medical ultrasound imaging researches. © 2012 IEEE.515518 IEEE EMB,IEEE CAS,IEEE SMC,SONNETThomenius, K.E., Evaluation of ultrasound beamformers (1996) Proc. IEEE Ultrason. Symp., pp. 1615-1621Basoglu, C., Managuli, R., York, G., Kim, Y., Computing requirements of modern medical diagnostic ultrasound machines (1998) Parallel Computing, 24, pp. 1407-1431. , SepRicci, S., Bassi, L., Boni, E., Dallai, A., Tortoli, P., Multichannel FPGA-based arbitrary waveform generator for medical ultrasound (2007) Electronics Letters, 43 (24), pp. 1335-1336Bassi, L., Boni, E., Cellai, A., Dallai, A., Guidi, F., Ricci, S., Tortoli, P., A novel digital ultrasound system for experimental research activities (2008) Proceeding of 11th EUROMICRO, pp. 413-417. , SeptCincotti, G., Cardone, G., Efficient transmit beamforming in pulse echo ultrasonic imaging (1999) IEEE Trans. Ultrason. Ferroelectr. Freq. Control, 46 (6), pp. 1450-1458. , NovHu, C.-H., Xu, X.-C., Cannata, J.M., Yen, J.T., Kirk Shung, K., Development of a real-time, high-frequency ultrasound digital beamformer for high-frequency linear array transducers (2006) IEEE Trans. Ultrason. Ferroelectr. Freq. Control, 53 (2), pp. 317-323. , FebHuang, S.W., Li, P.C., Arbitrary waveform coded excitation using bipolar square wave pulsers in medical ultrasound (2006) IEEE Trans. Ultrason. Ferroelectr. Freq. Control, 53 (1), pp. 106-116. , JanXu, X., Yen, J.T., Shung, K.K., A low-cost bipolar pulse generator for high frequency ultrasound applications (2007) IEEE Trans. Ultrason. Ferroelectr. Freq. Control, 54 (2), pp. 443-447. , Feb(2011) MD2130 High Speed Ultrasound Beamforming Source Driver, , Sunnyvale, CA: Supertex In