Portable low cost ultrasound imaging system

Abstract

The applications of ultrasound in medicine have been increasing in the last decade either in diagnostics or in treatments. Ultrasound is routinely used in clinical examinations, such as pregnancy exams. On the other hand, a typical ultrasound system costs somewhere between 100k$ to 250k$ because of its (1) expensive ultrasound transducers, (2) large driving electronics, (3) processing and visualization units. High cost and large volume of the ultrasound systems prevent even wider usage of these systems. It is possible to extent the use of ultrasound in clinic environment like a stethoscope, if the size and cost had been reduced orders of magnitude. The aim of this work is to develop an ultraportable and very low cost diagnostic ultrasound imaging probe; by combining inertial sensors with the probes. The manual motion of the probe by the operator's hand movement enables scanning. The position of the probe is tracked using inertial sensors. Finally, the acoustic reflections are registered together by the help of position information of the probe to form an image.TÜBİTA

Open Electronics for Medical Devices: State-of-Art and Unique Advantages

“…al. [47] are not very conclusive. In this direction, a significant improvement over [47] is Jonveaux [53].…”

“…[47] are not very conclusive. In this direction, a significant improvement over [47] is Jonveaux [53]. Jonveaux has described a highly modular ultrasound imaging platform based on microcontrollers and not using FPGAs altogether.…”

“…Sobhani et al [47] have developed an ultrasonic system based on raspberry pi and PIC32 microcontroller. The setup is shown in Figure 5.…”

“…To conclude, for a high-frequency low noise healthcare project such as ultrasound, a designer may find it very useful to leverage a range of off-the-shelf evaluation boards for FPGA, microprocessor, System on Chip, analog to digital converter, ultrasonic pulser, analog front end etc. Although FPGA has been used with great success for ultrasonic platforms, it is possible to use high frequency microcontrollers for simpler designs [47,53].…”

Arduino-Like Development Kit for Single-Element Ultrasound Imaging

“…A simpler 4-channel acquisition setup was built with an annular array, but with no automatic movement. A more recent approach combines relatively a 4-channel [19], similar to our design, coupled to a Raspberry Pi [15,16]. So far, state-of-the-art systems cannot be built with abundant modules and easily assembled components.…”