LightProbe: A Digital Ultrasound Probe for Software-Defined Ultrafast Imaging

Abstract

Digital ultrasound probes integrate the analog frontend in the housing of the probe handle and provide a digital interface instead of requiring an expensive coaxial cable harness to connect. Current digital probes target the portable market and perform the bulk of the processing (beamforming) on the probe, which enables the probe to be connected to commodity devices such as tablets or smartphones running an ultrasound app to display the image and control the probe. Thermal constraints limit the number of front-end channels as well as the complexity of the processing. This prevents current digital probes to support advanced modalities such as Vector Flow or Elastography requiring high-frame rate (HFR) imaging. In this paper, we present LIGHTPROBE, a digital ultrasound probe, which integrates a 64-channel 100 Vpp TX/RX frontend including analog-to-digital conversion (up to 32.5 MS/s @ 12 bit), and is equipped with an optical high-speed link (26.4 Gb/s) providing sustainable raw samples access to all channels, which allows the processing to be performed on the connected device without thermal power constraints. By connecting the probe to a GPU-equipped PC, we demonstrate the flexibility of softwaredefined B-mode imaging using conventional and ultrafast methods. We achieve plane-wave and synthetic aperture imaging with frame-rates from 30 Hz up to 500 Hz consuming between 5.6 W and 10.7 W. By using a combination of power and thermal management techniques, we demonstrate that the probe can remain within operating temperature limits even without active cooling, while never having to turn the probe off for cooling hence providing a consistent Quality of Service for the operator.

STB-SASB: Combining Synthetic Aperture Sequential Beamforming with Synthetic Transmit Beams for Wireless Ultrasound Probes

“…All measurements are performed for 30 Hz imaging. The front-end is turned off between frames to save energy [7]. The processing power E P is estimated with a differential measurement with and without deploying the first-state SASB beamformer on the FPGA.…”

“…For the measurements, a CIRS 054GS phantom is used with a 4 MHz 2-period ±50 V transmit pulse, and 20 MHz receive sampling. The used setup is exactly the same as in [7] to enable comparison. In this work, we are evaluating the following strategies in detail: TXF1 Conventional sequential imaging with 91 scanlines and fixed transmit focus at 5 cm (78 • field-of-view).…”

“…For the probe hardware, we are using our digital ultrasound probe, LIGHTPROBE [7]. LIGHTPROBE is a 64-channel 4 MHz phased-array probe that embeds the entire transmit-receive front-end in the probe handle.…”

CMOS-integrated biosensor circuits and systems : FMCW radar sensor for noncontact multimodal vital signs monitoring and coherent photoacoustic sensor for non-invasive in vivo sensing and imaging

“…To enable the pervasive healthcare, the sensors need to monitor the health indicators such as respiration rate, heartbeat rate, blood core temperature, and detect the possible risky accidents like falling accurately in real-time [3]- [8]. Moreover, it would be promising to implement the imaging on in vivo objects with compact-sized devices, enabling the potential disease diagnosis in a portable or wearable way [44]- [52].…”

“…Besides in-depth temperature monitoring and physiological signs sensing, another essential application of the PA sensor system is in vivo imaging. Nowadays, medical ultrasound imaging contributes to a more critical role in disease diagnosis and healthcare monitoring [44]- [50]. Compared to cross-sectional imaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), X-ray-computed tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET), etc., ultrasound imaging does not need the ionization process, which requires an expensive, bulky system to realize the function, and the ionization process is usually harmful to the human body.…”