Real-Time Reflection Imaging System for Ultrasound Computed Tomography With a Circular Ring Array

Abstract

Real-time imaging is a major advantage of medical ultrasound technology and a challenging feature for other clinical imaging modalities to match. Ultrasound computed tomography (USCT), a novel ultrasound imaging technique that has recently gained considerable attention, offers high-resolution, 3-D imaging without radiation. However, the amount of data generated by a USCT imaging system is overwhelming, and traditional GPU acceleration methods can be time-consuming due to data transfer and processing. To address these issues, a high-speed multichannel parallel computing architecture is necessary. This article presents a real-time USCT reflection imaging system. The system features a circular ring array (CRA) with 2048 elements, a data acquisition system comprising 512 transmit and receive channels, and a computer equipped with a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) accelerator card. Radio frequency data are acquired by the data acquisition system and transmitted to the FPGA accelerator card via a quad-channel 10-gigabit Ethernet interface. The accelerator card processes the data using full-aperture tomography (FAT) to perform parallel reconstruction tasks. The prototype implementation, verified on an Xilinx KU115 FPGA, achieves a processing throughput of 8 frames per second (2.10 $10{^{{6}}}$ pixels per second (PPS) for a frame size of 512 512 pixels). The results of in vivo imaging experiments demonstrate the excellent image quality of the system and its real-time imaging capabilities.