Novel low-power ultrasound digital preprocessing architecture for wireless display

Area of Science:

• Biomedical Engineering
• Electrical Engineering
• Medical Imaging

Background:

• Traditional ultrasound systems often rely on power-hungry preprocessing units.
• Existing solutions can be limited in performance and power efficiency.
• Wireless data transfer in ultrasound probes is an emerging area for improved application flexibility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a complete hardware-based ultrasound preprocessing unit (PPU) as a power-efficient alternative.
• To enable wireless data transfer from ultrasonic probes for expanded applications.
• To enhance image quality and processing performance in ultrasound systems.

Main Methods:

• A fully pipelined digital back-end architecture for the PPU was designed.
• An adaptive subsampling method was implemented for the pixel compressor.
• The PPU was integrated with a wireless link for data transmission.
• Performance was evaluated using a reference phantom and a 5-MHz piezoelectric transducer.

Main Results:

• The PPU achieved significantly higher performance (53.15 DMIPS/MHz) compared to software-based systems (1.6 DMIPS/MHz).
• Adaptive subsampling enabled real-time image zooming and improved lateral (25%) and axial (33%) resolutions.
• The digital PPU demonstrated substantial power savings, consuming only 242 mW (approx. 20% of software systems).
• Excellent power-performance ratios were achieved at various sampling frequencies (26-43.9 DMIPS/mW).

Conclusions:

• The proposed hardware-based PPU offers a feasible and highly efficient solution for advanced ultrasonic imaging.
• The wireless capability and enhanced processing significantly expand potential applications for ultrasound technology.
• This PPU represents a substantial advancement in low-power, high-performance ultrasound signal processing.