FPGA design and implementation for EIT data acquisition

OXBACT-5 was designed to meet the challenges involved in working in the intensive care hospital environment focussed particularly on thoracic imaging of patients with respiratory distress and chronic heart failure (CHF). The FPGA-based wireless LAN linked multi-channel EIT data acquisition system (DAS) providing 16 programmable excitation current channels and 64 voltage measurement channels is presented. It contains function modules of a PCI bus interface, direct digital synthesizers, dual-port memory blocks, digital demodulation and all the command and control logic in the FPGA. The whole EIT data acquisition system is fully programmable and reconfigurable from the host PC. The excitation frequency, excitation patterns, the measuring sequence and the gain of each measurement channel can be set from the host PC before each measurement. The demodulation is implemented in the FPGA chip to reduce the data rate between the DAS and the host PC. In addition, measurement process management is achieved in this FPGA chip. Complemented by analogue devices such as ADCs, DACs, analogue buffers and analogue multiplexers, the new FPGA-based EIT DAS system is implemented in a very compact way for bedside use in intensive care units of hospitals. It is intended for applications such as continuous respiration monitoring with data collection at 25 frames per second. Image reconstruction times depend on the choice of 2D or 3D imaging algorithms and the available processing power.