FPGA technology in process tomography

The aims of this paper are to provide a review of the process tomography applications employing field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) and to understand current FPGA related researches, in order to seek for the possibility to applied FPGA technology in an ultrasonic process tomography system. FPGA allows users to implement complete systems on a programmable chip, meanwhile, five main benefits of applying the FPGA technology are performance, time to market, cost, reliability, and long-term maintenance. These advantages definitely could help in the revolution of process tomography, especially for ultrasonic process tomography and electrical process tomography. Future work is focused on the ultrasonic process tomography for chemical process column investigation using FPGA for the aspects of low cost, high speed and reconstructed image quality

Mengenal pasti tahap pengetahuan pelajar tahun akhir Ijazah Sarjana Muda Kejuruteraan di KUiTTHO dalam bidang keusahawanan dari aspek pengurusan modal

Malaysia ialah sebuah negara membangun di dunia. Dalam proses pembangunan ini, hasrat negara untuk melahirkan bakal usahawan beijaya tidak boleh dipandang ringan. Oleh itu, pengetahuan dalam bidang keusahawanan perlu diberi perhatian dengan sewajarnya; antara aspek utama dalam keusahawanan ialah modal. Pengurusan modal yang tidak cekap menjadi punca utama kegagalan usahawan. Menyedari hakikat ini, kajian berkaitan Pengurusan Modal dijalankan ke atas 100 orang pelajar Tahun Akhir Kejuruteraan di KUiTTHO. Sampel ini dipilih kerana pelajar-pelajar ini akan menempuhi alam pekeijaan di mana mereka boleh memilih keusahawanan sebagai satu keijaya. Walau pun mereka bukanlah pelajar dari jurusan perniagaan, namun mereka mempunyai kemahiran dalam mereka cipta produk yang boleh dikomersialkan. Hasil dapatan kajian membuktikan bahawa pelajar-pelajar ini berminat dalam bidang keusahawanan namun masih kurang pengetahuan tentang pengurusan modal terutamanya dalam menentukan modal permulaan, pengurusan modal keija dan caracara menentukan pembiayaan kewangan menggunakan kaedah jualan harian. Oleh itu, satu garis panduan Pengurusan Modal dibina untuk memberi pendedahan kepada mereka

Efficient reconfigurable architectures for 3D medical image compression

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Recently, the more widespread use of three-dimensional (3-D) imaging modalities, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), and ultrasound (US) have generated a massive amount of volumetric data. These have provided an impetus to the development of other applications, in particular telemedicine and teleradiology. In these fields, medical image compression is important since both efficient storage and transmission of data through high-bandwidth digital communication lines are of crucial importance. Despite their advantages, most 3-D medical imaging algorithms are computationally intensive with matrix transformation as the most fundamental operation involved in the transform-based methods. Therefore, there is a real need for high-performance systems, whilst keeping architectures exible to allow for quick upgradeability with real-time applications. Moreover, in order to obtain efficient solutions for large medical volumes data, an efficient implementation of these operations is of significant importance. Reconfigurable hardware, in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) has been proposed as viable system building block in the construction of high-performance systems at an economical price. Consequently, FPGAs seem an ideal candidate to harness and exploit their inherent advantages such as massive parallelism capabilities, multimillion gate counts, and special low-power packages. The key achievements of the work presented in this thesis are summarised as follows. Two architectures for 3-D Haar wavelet transform (HWT) have been proposed based on transpose-based computation and partial reconfiguration suitable for 3-D medical imaging applications. These applications require continuous hardware servicing, and as a result dynamic partial reconfiguration (DPR) has been introduced. Comparative study for both non-partial and partial reconfiguration implementation has shown that DPR offers many advantages and leads to a compelling solution for implementing computationally intensive applications such as 3-D medical image compression. Using DPR, several large systems are mapped to small hardware resources, and the area, power consumption as well as maximum frequency are optimised and improved. Moreover, an FPGA-based architecture of the finite Radon transform (FRAT)with three design strategies has been proposed: direct implementation of pseudo-code with a sequential or pipelined description, and block random access memory (BRAM)- based method. An analysis with various medical imaging modalities has been carried out. Results obtained for image de-noising implementation using FRAT exhibits promising results in reducing Gaussian white noise in medical images. In terms of hardware implementation, promising trade-offs on maximum frequency, throughput and area are also achieved. Furthermore, a novel hardware implementation of 3-D medical image compression system with context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) has been proposed. An evaluation of the 3-D integer transform (IT) and the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with lifting scheme (LS) for transform blocks reveal that 3-D IT demonstrates better computational complexity than the 3-D DWT, whilst the 3-D DWT with LS exhibits a lossless compression that is significantly useful for medical image compression. Additionally, an architecture of CAVLC that is capable of compressing high-definition (HD) images in real-time without any buffer between the quantiser and the entropy coder is proposed. Through a judicious parallelisation, promising results have been obtained with limited resources. In summary, this research is tackling the issues of massive 3-D medical volumes data that requires compression as well as hardware implementation to accelerate the slowest operations in the system. Results obtained also reveal a significant achievement in terms of the architecture efficiency and applications performance.Ministry of Higher Education Malaysia (MOHE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) and the British Counci

High-level synthesis design of scalable ultrafast ultrasound beamformer with single FPGA

Ultrafast ultrasound imaging is essential for advanced ultrasound imaging techniques such as ultrasound localization microscopy (ULM) and functional ultrasound (fUS). Current ultrafast ultrasound imaging is challenged by the ultrahigh data bandwidth associated with the radio frequency (RF) signal, and by the latency of the computationally expensive beamforming process. As such, continuous ultrafast data acquisition and beamforming remain elusive with existing software beamformers based on CPUs or GPUs. To address these challenges, the proposed work introduces a novel method of implementing an ultrafast ultrasound beamformer specifically for ultrafast plane wave imaging (PWI) on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) by using high-level synthesis. A parallelized implementation of the beamformer on a single FPGA was proposed by 1) utilizing a delay compression technique to reduce the delay profile size, which enables both run-time pre-calculated delay profile loading from external memory and delay reuse 2) vectorizing channel data fetching which is enabled by delay reuse, and 3) using fixed summing networks to reduce consumption of logic resources. Our proposed method presents two unique advantages over current FPGA beamformers: 1) high scalability that allows fast adaptation to different FPGA resources and beamforming speed demands by using Xilinx High-Level Synthesis as the development tool, and 2) allow a compact form factor design by using a single FPGA to complete the beamforming instead of multiple FPGAs. With the proposed method, a sustainable average beamforming rate of 4.83 G samples/second in terms of input raw RF sample was achieved. The resulting image quality of the proposed beamformer was compared with the software beamformer on the Verasonics Vantage system for both phantom imaging and in vivo imaging of a mouse brain