A High-Speed Reconfigurable System for Ultrasound Research

Abstract

Many opportunities exist in medical ultrasound research for experimenting with novel designs, both of transducers and of signal processing techniques. However any experiment must have a reliable platform on which to develop these techniques. In my thesis work, I have designed, built, and tested a high-speed reconfigurable ultrasound beamforming platform. The complete receive beamformer system described in this thesis consists of hardware, firmware, and software components. All of these components work together to provide a platform for beamforming that is expandable, high-speed, and robust. The complexity of the operations being performed is hidden from the user by a simple to use and accessible software interface. Existing beamformer hardware is usually designed for real-time 2D image formation often using serial processing. The platform I built uses parallel processing in order to process ultrasound images 100 times faster than conventional systems. Conventional hardware is locked to a single or small number of similar transducers, while my design can be on-the-fly reprogrammed to work with nearly any transducer type. The system is also expandable to handle any size of device, while conventional systems can only handle a fixed number of device channels. The software I have created interfaces with the hardware and firmware components to provide an easy way to make use of the system’s reconfigurability. It also delivers a platform that can be simply expanded to host post-processing or signal analysis software to further fulfill a researcher’s needs.