A new smart probe system for a tablet PC-based point-of-care ultrasound imaging system: Feasibility study

Abstract

There is a growing interest in a hand-held ultrasound (US) system for a point-of-care diagnosis. In this paper, we present the hand-held smart US probe system, which includes analog and digital front-ends, mid-processor, and interface. In the analog front-end, 16 channels could be implemented using two eight-channel high-voltage pulsers and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The following digital frontend was implemented using a single low-cost field programmable gate array chip (FPGA). The output data from the digital frontend are transferred to the commercial tablet PC via the USB 3.0 interface. The tablet PC performs the back-end processing and image display on a graphical user interface (GUI). The smart probe system developed can provide the real-time B-mode images up to 22 Hz of frame rate with 7 W of estimated maximum power consumption. The weight and dimension of the developed system are 73 g and 150 x 40 x 10 mm 3 in length, width, and height, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the proposed smart probe system, the phantom and in vivo experiments were conducted.

A Pseudo-Dynamic Delay Calculation Using Optimal Zone Segmentation for Ultra-Compact Ultrasound Imaging Systems

“…In the last few decades, there have been extensive accomplishments in point-of-care US imaging with several electronic systems in dedicated units [2,11], tablet PCs [18], and smartphone-based form factors [19]. This technological evolution inevitably necessitates more efficient receive beamforming for better clinical efficacy in terms of beamforming precision, system volume, and battery life.…”

“…Moreover, the PDC-Optimal method could significantly reduce hardware complexity and dynamic power consumption compared to the unconstrained DDC and PDC-TS methods (Table 1), which will enable a more compact system volume and a lighter weight with a longer battery life. We already embodied the proposed PDC-Optimal method in 16-channel tablet PC-based and smartphone-based prototypes using a low-cost FPGA (Spartan-6 LX150, Xilinx Inc., USA) [18][19][20]. The prototype was 180 × 55 × 35 mm 3 and~180 g, supporting B-mode and color Doppler mode at 1 of τ.…”

Arduino-Like Development Kit for Single-Element Ultrasound Imaging

“…Most of systems are FPGA (or DSP) based, especially for higher imaging frequencies [4,5,9], as well as using multiple-element transducers [7,10] -while maintaining costs and power consumption low. We considered that programming FPGA (even DSPs) was a steep requirement for non-specialists, hence we focused on alternatives.…”

An Angle Independent Depth Aware Fusion Beamforming Approach for Ultrafast Ultrasound Flow Imaging

“…al. also proposed a smartphone-based POCUS using a low-cost Xilinx Spartan 6 FPGA [8], similar to the work in [6]. The work also proposes a 16-channel system that can be extended to 32 channels using the EA method with a maximum frame rate of 58 f ps.…”

“…al. using a single Xilinx Spartan FPGA [6]. The system employs 16 channels, which can be extended to 32 channels using the EA method, with a maximum frame rate of 22 f ps.…”