Experimental system prototype of a portable, low-cost, C-scan ultrasound imaging device

A system prototype of a future compact, low-cost medical ultrasound device is described and presented with experimental results. The prototype system consists of a 32 x 32 element, fully sampled 2-D transducer array and a printed circuit board (PCB) containing 16 custom "front-end" receive channel integrated circuits (ICs) with analog multiplexing and programmable logic. A PC that included a commercially available data acquisition card is used for data collection and analysis. Beamforming is performed offline using the direct sampled in-phase/quadrature (DSIQ) algorithm. Pulse-echo images obtained with the prototype are presented. Results from this prototype support the feasibility of a low-cost, pocket-sized, C-scan imaging device.