A FPGA-based portable ultrafast ultrasound image system achieved by 8 channels

Abstract

With the development of technology ultrafast ultrasound imaging technology has been widely applied in academic and clinical fields Because thousands of frames can be produced in one second with ultrafast imaging technology it becomes easier to obtain what happening in few micro seconds It is suitable for estimating tissue motion and blood flowing At present functional ultrasound images such as shear wave elastography vector Doppler flow imaging and pulse wave velocity have become mainstream clinical applications and research tools However this technology is not supported by any ultrasound system The systems must include some typically features like high-speed and independent T/R channel huge memory size and programmability But there are some disadvantages on the commercial systems such as the inflexible specification high price and low cost performance rate Therefore there are still some research groups that independently develop their own devices to implement different applications The purpose of this study is to develop a system which can support ultrafast ultrasound technology and be expanded or deleted features flexibly to suit different usage scenarios This system includes a customized 5MHz and SNR is 47 8dB 16-channel array transducer FPGA mother board 8-channel ultrasound T/R module high-speed USB 3 0 interface and power supply module with high voltage The ultrasound pulse repetition frequency and pulse center frequency are controlled by the programmable FPGA In addition a central processing unit is designed in this chip to control the sequence flow and data transmission In the real-time part the system can transmit the data of 8 channels to the terminal computer for processing and displaying with the frame rate at 60 Hz In the ultrafast mode the system can store the data in the memory at 5k PRF for 5 seconds The data can be transmitted to the terminal computer in few seconds through the high-speed USB 3 0 interface For an experimental prototype in addition to the lack of the number of channels this system has the specifications required for ultrafast ultrasound imaging systems As far as the current architecture is concerned it is possible to easily expand the functions by stacking more T/R modules and swapping or adding more RAM to acquiring more data In this way the system can be applied in different usage scenarios to accelerate the research of ultrasound imaging algorithms

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chih-Chung Huang (Supervisor)