Novel architecture for wireless transducer based ultrasound imaging system

摘要

In medical ultrasound scanning, coaxial cables connects the transducer elements to the computing platforms. During scanning, these probes are hanging from sonographer hand and slides on the patient body providing discomfort for both patient and sonographer. To address this issue, we discussed the feasibility of realizing wireless ultrasound transducer and as a proof of concept we built the prototype of wireless ultrasound transducer based scanning system. The proposed system has two parts: wireless transducer with embedded pre-processing unit, and back-end module for image reconstruction and display purpose. The embedded pre-processing unit consist of analog and digital integrated circuits, transmit beamforming, low noise amplification, time gain compensation and receive beam forming. The output of wireless transducer is scanline data, which is transmitted to back-end module via wireless communication transceiver. The complete back-end module is implemented on a Zedboard platform which comes with FPGA and ARM processor. The signal processing algorithms, which include envelope detection, log compression, scan conversion, interpolation and decimation algorithms are implemented on FPGA, while ARM processor is used to control and coordinate between signal processing modules. The Wi-Fi 802.11n standard is used as a wireless communication transceiver between wireless transducer and back-end module. The wireless transducer prototype is designed for 64 element, 8 channel linear transducer. The proposed prototype of wireless transducer based scanning system is successfully tested by scanning a phantom.