Reconfigurable Color Doppler DSP Engine Design for High-Frequency Ultrasonic Imaging Systems
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Yu, Tzu-Hao
DOI
en-US
Abstract
Ultrasonic imaging is a well-established imaging modality that has the advantages of cost-effectiveness, non-invasiveness, rapid imaging, and portability. In the 1980’s, high-frequency ultrasound had been developed for the detection in industrial applications. Meanwhile, the development of medical ultrasonic imaging was flourishing. Although traditional low-frequency (2~10 MHz) ultrasonic imaging system can meet most clinical applications, high-frequency medical ultrasound has become increasingly important for its good spatial resolution which can be utilized by some specific applications such as ophthalmology and dermatology.
With the evolution of high-speed electronics and high-frequency transducer fabrication, the research direction has gradually changed from transducer fabrication and modeling to signal and image processing or even harmonic imaging, Doppler flow estimation, and contrast agent. Although high-frequency medical ultrasound has been developed for about 20 years, there are many applications to be developed and problems to be solved. In the near future, with the fast progress of electronics and biotechnology, high-frequency ultrasound will be more and more important in ophthalmology, dermatology, intravascular imaging, small animal imaging, and genetics development.
Color Doppler imaging is a well-established Doppler ultrasound mode and very valuable for visualizing in real time the distribution of blood flow in a specific region of interest. However, it is computationally quite expensive. To meet the large computational and data bandwidth needs in Color Doppler imaging, dedicated hardware design is required to reduce the area and power consumption while provide valuable information in real time.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no high-frequency (> 20 MHz) ultrasonic imaging system supporting Color Doppler mode ever published. Also, the portability of current high-frequency ultrasonic imaging systems is insufficient. This will be more and more unacceptable since it is inconvenient and sometimes harmful for patients to go to the hospital for diagnoses. The high cost also reduces the popularity of such medical devices. Moreover, in ambulances or battlefields, portable devices supporting immediate diagnosis can greatly increase the survival rate.
In this thesis, the research topic is to design and implement a Color Doppler DSP engine optimized for the high-frequency ultrasonic imaging system under our development. The major goals of our imaging system are good portability, flexibility, and image quality. Hence, the presented Color Doppler DSP engine is guided to have three features. First, it is implemented with customized ASIC design for low power and low cost considerations. Second, the reconfigurable system parameters of the proposed DSP engine enable users to acquire sufficient information as needed. Finally, its strong de-noising ability results in satisfying image quality. The proposed Color Doppler DSP engine is implemented with TSMC 0.18 μm CMOS technology and also emulated by Altera Stratix-II FPGA. Acting as the computation kernel of our developing high-frequency ultrasonic imaging system, the proposed Color Doppler DSP engine is significant to the clinical and research field.
Subjects
超音波影像
都卜勒
數位訊號處理引擎
Ultrasonic imaging
high-frequency
Doppler
DSP engine
Type
thesis
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