This paper presents a preliminary evaluation work on a pre-designed 3-D ultrasound imaging system. The system mainly consists of four parts, a 7.5MHz, 24×24 2-D array transducer, the transmit/receive circuit, power supply, data acquisition and real-time imaging module. The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication, which greatly reduces the number of active channels . The element area of the transducer is 4.6mm by 4.6mm. Four kinds of tests were carried out to evaluate the imaging performance, including the penetration depth range, axial and lateral resolution, positioning accuracy and 3-D imaging frame rate. Several strong reflection metal objects , fixed in a water tank, were selected for the purpose of imaging due to a low signal-to-noise ratio of the transducer. The distance between the transducer and the tested objects , the thickness of aluminum, and the seam width of the aluminum sheet were measured by a calibrated micrometer to evaluate the penetration depth, the axial and lateral resolution, respectively. The experiment al results showed that the imaging penetration depth range was from 1.0cm to 6.2cm, the axial and lateral resolution were 0.32mm and 1.37mm respectively, the imaging speed was up to 27 frames per second and the positioning accuracy was 9.2%.
This paper presents a work of real-time 3-D image reconstruction for a 7.5-MHz, 24×24 row-column addressing array transducer. The transducer works with a predesigned transmit/receive module. After the raw data are captured by the NI PXIe data acquisition (DAQ) module, the following processing procedures are performed: delay and sum (DAS), base-line calibration, envelope detection, logarithm compression, down-sampling, gray scale mapping and 3-D display. These procedures are optimized for obtaining real-time 3-D images. Fixed-point focusing scheme is applied in delay and sum (DAS) to obtain line data from channel data. Zero-phase high-pass filter is used to calibrate the base-line shift of echo. The classical Hilbert transformation is adopted to detect the envelopes of echo. Logarithm compression is implemented to enlarge the weak signals and narrow the gap from the strong ones. Down-sampling reduces the amount of data to improve the processing speed. Linear gray scale mapping is introduced that the weakest signal is mapped to 0 and the strongest signal 255. The real-time 3-D images are displayed with multi-planar mode, which shows three orthogonal sections (vertical section, coronal section, transverse section). A trigger signal is sent from the transmit/receive module to the DAQ module at the start of each volume data generation to ensure synchronization between these two modules. All procedures, include data acquisition (DAQ), signal processing and image display, are programmed on the platform of LabVIEW. 675MB raw echo data are acquired in one minute to generate 24×24×48, 27fps 3-D images. The experiment on the strong reflection object (aluminum slice) shows the feasibility of the whole process from raw data to real-time 3-D images.
KEYWORDS: Data acquisition, Ultrasonography, Transducers, Imaging systems, Field programmable gate arrays, 3D image processing, Analog electronics, Amplifiers, Electrodes, Image processing
This paper present a preliminary work on a pre-beamformed data acquisition ultrasound imaging system for a
3-MHz, 32×32 2-D array tranducer . The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication.
This scheme provides a simple interconnection, consisting of one top and one bottom single-layer flex circuits. The
designed system can acquire pre-beamformed data with 12-bit resolution at 40-MHz sampling rate. The digitized
data of all channels are first fed through FPGAs to deserialize and stored in a 4GB RAM buffer. The acquired data
can be transferred through a 1000 Mbps Ethernet link to a computer for off-line processing and analysis. The system
design is based on high-level commercial integrated circuits to obtain the maximum flexibility and minimum system
complexity. Partial beam summation have been performed to help finish the 3-D B-mode volumetric imaging.
Key words: ultrasound imaging system, 2-D array transducer, row-column addressing, off-line processing
KEYWORDS: Ultrasonics, Field programmable gate arrays, Imaging systems, Lutetium, Data communications, Diffraction, Ultrasonography, Medical imaging, Telecommunications, Digital electronics
The limited diffraction beams such as X-wave have the properties of larger depth of field. Thus, it has the potential
to generate ultra-high frame rate ultrasound images. However, in practice, the real-time generation of X-wave ultrasonic field requires complex and high-cost system, especially the precise and specific voltage time distribution part for the excitation of each distinct array element. In order to simplify the hardware realization of X-wave, based on the previous works, X-wave excitation signals were decomposed and expressed as the superposition of a group of simple driving pulses, such as rectangular and triangular waves. The hardware system for the X-wave generator was also designed. The generator consists of a computer for communication with the circuit, universal serial bus (USB) based micro-controller unit (MCU) for data transmission, field programmable gate array (FPGA) based Direct Digital Synthesizer(DDS), 12-bit digital-to-analog (D/A) converter and a two stage amplifier.The hardware simulation results show that the designed system can generate the waveforms at different radius approximating the theoretical X-wave excitations with a maximum error of 0.49% triggered by the quantification of amplitude data.
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