Portable Low Cost Ultrasound Imaging System
ABSTRACT
2013 National Grants
Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Ultrasonic imaging systems are being widely used. Medical professionals such as doctors and sonographers use a handheld
probe that is directly placed on to a patient to image different body parts. Various probes are used to image different body
parts and internal organs. Probes usually employ a transducer array. Typically these transducer arrays have 64, 96 or
128 elements. While in use, each element of the transducer is driven by a dedicated beam former electronics in transmit.
Similarly reflected acoustic echoes are collected again by a dedicated receive beam former electronics. By using beam
formers 2D and 3D images are obtained without mechanical scanning. However due to high channel count and large amount
of data that needs to be processed, ultrasonic imaging systems are quite expensive. A typical system costs somewhere
between $100K to $250K. Recently low cost laptop computer based ultrasound systems have been developed to facilitate the
common use of ultrasound devices. The cost reduction is achieved by reducing the channel count. The aim was to increase
the use of ultrasound systems by doctors. However, even these systems are quite expensive, on the orders of $20K (except a
few systems). This high cost limited the wide use of these systems. The main reason for the high cost is the duplicated beam
former electronics as many times as the number of elements and large amount of data that needs to be processed digitally.
A reasonable image quality requires a high channel count, which complicates the analog and digital circuitry resulting in
high system cost.Rece