A low-cost B-mode USB ultrasound probe

The Universal Serial Bus (USB) is now the ubiquitous interface bus of choice for connecting peripherals to personal computers and laptops. USB 2.0 is a half-duplex bus running at 480 Mb/s and each peripheral can draw as much as 500 mA of current at a nominal 5 V from the USB connector. We have developed a family of USB-based, B-mode probes that connect directly to a personal computer or laptop and that draw as little as 250 mA (1.25 W) when forming ten 5 MHz images/second. The pulser/receiver, high voltage supply, analog-to-digital converter, servo and USB interface are implemented on a small circuit board inside the probe body. After raw data are transferred to the computer, gain compensation, interpolation, filtering and other data processing are performed by the host processor. This gives flexibility to developers and allows enhancements to the system to be incorporated via software updates. In addition, the raw data are available for storage and later postprocessing. There are several advantages to this architectural approach to B-mode imaging, including low cost, portability and optimal signal-to-noise performance. This paper describes the advantages of the architecture of the probe family, discusses the hardware/software division of the required processing steps and presents example images from a 12.5 MHz ophthalmic probe.