High-performance embedded synthetic aperture medical ultrasound imaging system

Abstract

Medical ultrasound imaging technology has a large scale practical applications in medical diagnostics. In medical ultrasonic synthetic aperture imaging, an array of sensors receive ultrasound echoes and process the echoes to gain low-resolution images which are further processed to obtain high-resolution images. Currently the most common processing algorithm to obtain low-resolution images is delay-and-sum method. This paper mainly focuses on implementing synthetic aperture algorithm in high-performance embedded platform and evaluating its performance. In the estimation of the ultrasonic synthetic aperture algorithm, Field II simulator was used to generate the needed digital ultrasound transducer data. The high-performance embedded computing platform with a graphics processing unit was used to build the synthetic aperture solution and gained an 85 × speedup as compared to its single-core embedded processor implementation. Furthermore, the embedded implementation framework we have built can be easily used to build other high-definition medical ultrasound imaging algorithms.