High performance 3D adaptive filtering for DSP based portable medical imaging systems

Abstract

Portable medical imaging devices have proven valuable for emergency medical services both in the field and hospital environments and are becoming more prevalent in clinical settings where the use of larger imaging machines is impractical. Despite their constraints on power, size and cost, portable imaging devices must still deliver high quality images. 3D adaptive filtering is one of the most advanced techniques aimed at noise reduction and feature enhancement, but is computationally very demanding and hence often cannot be run with sufficient performance on a portable platform. In recent years, advanced multicore digital signal processors (DSP) have been developed that attain high processing performance while maintaining low levels of power dissipation. These processors enable the implementation of complex algorithms on a portable platform. In this study, the performance of a 3D adaptive filtering algorithm on a DSP is investigated. The performance is assessed by filtering a volume of size 512x256x128 voxels sampled at a pace of 10 MVoxels/sec with an Ultrasound 3D probe. Relative performance and power is addressed between a reference PC (Quad Core CPU) and a TMS320C6678 DSP from Texas Instruments.