An UWB microwave imaging system for breast cancer detection consists of antennas, transceivers, and a high-performance embedded system for elaborating the received signals and reconstructing breast images. In this article we focus on this embedded system. To accelerate the image reconstruction, the Beamforming phase has to be implemented in a parallel fashion. We assess its implementation in three currently available high-end platforms based on a multicore CPU, a GPU, and an FPGA, respectively. We then project the results applying technology scaling rules to future many-core CPUs, many-thread GPUs, and advanced FPGAs. We consider an optimistic case in which available resources increase according to Moore's law only, and a pessimistic case in which only a fraction of those resources are available due to a limited power budget. In both scenarios, an implementation that includes a high-end FPGA outperforms the other alternatives. Since the number of effectively usable cores in future many-cores will be power-limited, and there is a trend toward the integration of power-efficient accelerators, we conjecture that a chip consisting of a many-core section and a reconfigurable logic section will be the perfect platform for this application.
The Ultrawideband (UWB) imaging technique for breast cancer detection is based on the fact that cancerous cells have different dielectric characteristics than healthy tissues. When a UWB pulse in the microwave range strikes a cancerous region, the reflected signal is more intense than the backscatter originating from the surrounding fat tissue. A UWB imaging system consists of transmitters, receivers, and antennas for the RF part, and of a digital back-end for processing the received signals. In this paper we focus on the imaging unit, which elaborates the acquired data and produces 2D or 3D maps of reflected energies. We show that one of the processing tasks, Beamforming, is the most timing critical and cannot be executed in software by a standard microprocessor in a reasonable time. We thus propose a specialized hardware accelerator for it. We design the accelerator in VHDL and test it in an FPGA-based prototype. We also evaluate its performance when implemented on a CMOS 45 nm ASIC technology. The speed-up with respect to a software implementation is on the order of tens to hundreds, depending on the degree of parallelism permitted by the target technology.
In Ultra-Wideband (UWB) microwave imaging for breast cancer detection, UWB pulses illuminate the breast and the echoes are processed to create images. Adoption in screening campaigns requires the development of a fully-engineered medical imaging tool. In this paper we report on our experience with the design of this kind of UWB imaging system and illustrate some of the challenges the designers have to deal with at various levels, ranging from circuit-level choices to system-level architectural decisions, and to hardware/software partitioning of the imaging algorithms.
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