Field Programmable Gate Array Based Embedded System for High Frame Rate Ultrasound with Ethernet Interface

An embedded system for ultrasound scanner working at high frame rates of 1000 fps is presented. Data processing engine is in a Laptop interfacing with the scanner over Ethernet Interface. High frame rate is achieved by Multi-line transmission. The major challenge is to collect enormous amount of scanner data and process in the processing engine. Moving window algorithm, critical window capture and inter-frame compression methods for reducing the data rates is presented. Moving window algorithm is used to extract the necessary data to analyze the inter-frame movements across successive frames. One image frame is divided into several windows say 16 and in a multi frame period, only one window is send and remaining windows are discarded. This window is moved multi frame to multi frame. This data is super imposed on a complete frame data. The frame to frame variations is calculated window by window. This embedded system logic implementation is in FPGA's. Since all crystal excitation is used for achieving high frame rates, parallel receive beamforming is performed using matrix inversion principle. This low cost architecture is useful for telemedicine applications in remote areas of developing countries.