A new scheme for 3D ultrasound imaging with custom design FPGA based high-speed data acquisition system

Conventional ultrasound imaging is carried out with the help of a transducer that is made of a large number of phased array sensor elements which makes the overall system bulky, needs advanced technologies for fabrication and it is economically expensive. In the proposed scheme, we are using a single large active area based pulsing (T-X) transducer and a limited number of receiving (R-X) ultrasound phased array sensor elements based transducer. The limited number, 8 elements, array sensor is controlled with a custom design reconfiguration oriented FPGA and peripheral analog front end ADC board for high-speed data acquisition system for 3D ultrasound imaging. A large surface area based transducer element generates a tight and intense 3D ultrasound field in the region of interest. On the other hand, the back scattering ultrasound field is received with eight elements based ultrasound phased array sensors of micron size elements that are distributed sparsely in the 3D volume. A rotating stage is designed and fabricated to collect data around the ultrasound phantom for acquiring the signals and thereafter can be used for reconstructing 3D ultrasound computed tomographic imaging. A series of recorded and processed scattered ultrasound signals from phantom are obtained with the custom design FPGA based high-speed data acquisition system. The backscattered ultrasound signals are captured with our sensor module, integrated with the custom design system. The sensor module is made of a large active area based single element and phased array based multiple (8 elements) sensor elements which are rotated around the phantom to gather the signals for 3D ultrasound computed tomographic imaging. The advancement of the signal quality in terms of SNR is presented for both conventional and proposed new schemes. Data on a single channel out of 8 elements based phased array transducers is compared for both schemes.