Bedsides diagnosis using portable ultrasound scanning (PUS) offering comfortable diagnosis with various clinical advantages, in general, ultrasound scanners suffer from a poor signal-to-noise ratio, and physicians who operate the device at point-of-care may not be adequately trained to perform high level diagnosis. Such scenarios can be eradicated by incorporating ambient intelligence in PUS. In this paper, we propose an architecture for a PUS system, whose abilities include automated kidney detection in real time. Automated kidney detection is performed by training the Viola–Jones algorithm with a good set of kidney data consisting of diversified shapes and sizes. It is observed that the kidney detection algorithm delivers very good performance in terms of detection accuracy. The proposed PUS with kidney detection algorithm is implemented on a single Xilinx Kintex-7 FPGA, integrated with a Raspberry Pi ARM processor running at 900 MHz.

Abstract-In commercial ultrasound systems, the transmit module typically generates the time delayed excitation pulses to steer and focus the acoustic beam. However, the ultrasound transmitter module in these systems has limited access to medical ultrasound researchers. In this paper, we have presented the development of a programmable architecture for 8-channel ultrasound transmitter for medical ultrasound research activities. The proposed architecture consists of 8 transmit channels and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based configurable delay profile to steer acoustic beam, transmit frequency and pulse pattern length depending on the medical application. Our system operates in pulse-echo mode, with ultrasound transmit frequency up to 20 MHz, excitation voltage up to 100 Vpp, and individual channel control with single high speed Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). Pre-calculated delay profiles per scanline are generated in Matlab, based on physical parameters of 8 element linear transducer array which are used to steer and focus the ultrasound beam. An experiment is carried with our transmit module to transmit ultrasound into gelatin phantom, acquired echoes and processed for B-mode imaging. The results show that this transmit platform can be used for ultrasound imaging researches and also for medical diagnosis.

Abstract-In commercial ultrasound systems, the multielement transducer array is connected to analog front end electronics using long-wire high voltage coaxial cables. This paper presents the circuit design of 16-channel Transmit (Tx) and Receive (Rx) beamforming ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) that can be integrated in ultrasound probe head which reduces the number of coaxial cables. The proposed modular design for programmable 16-channel transmit beamformer operates at medical frequencies in pulse-echo mode and provides user control of transmit parameters such as transmit pulse length, pulse pattern, transmit frequency, and mode of excitation. The receive beamformer implements delay and coherent sum of the digitized echoes from 16 adjacent transducer elements to form scanlines required for image reconstruction. The proposed architecture of the Rx beamformer design provides great flexibility for beamforming, such as receive focusing with predetermined delay profile. Each transmit channel can be programmable to give a maximum delay of 163.85 µs with 1.25 ns delay resolution. The proposed design implements dynamic receive focusing with minimum time delay resolution of 3.125 ns for 40 MHz input data rate. The proposed ASIC of integrated Tx and Rx beamformer is implemented in UMC 130 nm technology using Synopsys ICC and Design Compiler. The implementation reports show that the area is 5.29 mm 2 , power dissipation is 38 mW.

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