Much as every medical professional listens beneath the skin with a stethoscope today, we foresee a time when hand-held medical imaging will become as ubiquitous; ?peering under the skin? using a hand-held imaging device. Hand-held imaging is not only a matter of convenience; moving the imaging device to the patient (rather than a critical patient to an imaging suite) has been shown to improve clinical outcomes. Moreover, the portability of hand-held systems can make advanced imaging available to traditionally underserved populations in the rural and developing world. Today, hand-held imaging is possible with compact, battery-operated ultrasound devices. However, existing hand-held ultrasound systems produce a low-resolution two-dimensional view within the patient, and fall far short of the image quality possible in state-of-the-art non-portable ultrasound systems. These larger systems can produce real-time 3D ultrasound images, drastically improving system ease of use, and have already been demonstrated to improve diagnostic efficiency. Moreover, direct 3D image acquisition enables new diagnostic capabilities that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with 2D, such as measuring volumetric blood flow. However, forming 3D ultrasound images requires over 5000 times more computing horsepower than comparable 2D imaging. Because it is in close contact with human skin, an ultrasound scan head must operate within a tight power budget (similar to that of a cell phone) to maintain safe temperatures. Developing a 3D ultrasound imaging system within this tight power budget requires innovation both in signal processing and computer architecture techniques.
This project will develop a new hardware architecture for 3D hand-held ultrasound that leverages co-design of hardware and beamforming algorithms, three-dimensional die stacking, massive parallelism, and streaming data flow, to enable high-resolution 3D ultrasound imaging in a hand-held device. The project focuses on three medical ultrasound applications areas: (i) image quality enhancements for general imaging applications, such as abdominal imaging; (ii) advanced 3D motion tracking; and (iii) high-frame-rate 3D flow tracking for cardiac applications. The proposed research program focuses on hardware acceleration for specific, novel applications of diagnostic ultrasound targeting heart disease and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, respectively the 1st and 3rd leading causes of death in the United States. Project innovations will be demonstrated and evaluated using an FPGA prototype to reconstruct images of physical phantoms captured with existing ultrasound probes.
