Initial Architecture Design of Ultrasound Synthetic Aperture Imaging Based on FPGA

Abstract

Ultrasound synthetic aperture imaging, in the A-SCAN data processing, consumes a lot of resources and takes a long time. It is difficult to achieve real-time imaging requirements. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) show advantages such as fast processing speed and strong parallelism for the ultrasonic synthetic aperture imaging platform. It provides a viable solution for real-time imaging. In this article, a new ultrasound synthetic aperture imaging structure is introduced, which reduces the resource consumption and improves the imaging efficiency. In this structure, the ultrasound imaging initialization structure is configured, and the index value is configured in the RAM using a memory initialization file, which reduces the square, extraction of a root and other operations in the hardware structure, and reduces the delay operation in the hardware structure. The symmetric relation exists between the index values of symmetric elements, the index values are reused to reduce the memory requirement. Perform functional descriptions using hardware description languages and perform performance tests on Altera Stratix IV FPGAs. According to 32-channel synthetic aperture imaging experiment, the use of index values for beamformer design improves the imaging efficiency and reduces the consumption of hardware resources under the premise of ensuring the ultrasound image and contrast.