• Gi-Duck Kim, Changhan Yoon, Sang-Bum Kye, Youngbae Lee, Jeeun Kang, Yangmo Yoo, and Tai-kyong Song.
• Department of Electronic Engineering, Sogang University, Seoul, Korea.
• IEEE Trans Ultrason Ferroelectr Freq Control. 2012 Jul 1;59(7):1386-94.

AbstractWe present a cost-effective portable ultrasound system based on a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for point-of-care applications. In the portable ultrasound system developed, all the ultrasound signal and image processing modules, including an effective 32-channel receive beamformer with pseudo-dynamic focusing, are embedded in an FPGA chip. For overall system control, a mobile processor running Linux at 667 MHz is used. The scan-converted ultrasound image data from the FPGA are directly transferred to the system controller via external direct memory access without a video processing unit. The potable ultrasound system developed can provide real-time B-mode imaging with a maximum frame rate of 30, and it has a battery life of approximately 1.5 h. These results indicate that the single FPGA-based portable ultrasound system developed is able to meet the processing requirements in medical ultrasound imaging while providing improved flexibility for adapting to emerging POC applications.

19 keywords...

hide…