Modelling and implementation of an ultrasound beamformer system based on DSP builder

Abstract

In this paper we present a model-based Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) design flow for ultrasound imaging using the delay-and-sum (DAS) beamforming technique. The beamformer model is based on DSP Builder toolbox in the Matlab/Simulink environment, used for fast prototype design and automatic hardware description language code generation for Intel FPGAs. The design was synthesized for an Intel Stratix IV FPGA and implemented on a Terasic DE4- 230 board, including the following digital signal processing steps: digital filtering, focusing delay adjustment, apodization, coherent summation, envelope detection and logarithmic compression. To evaluate our model, we used raw radiofrequency data from a phantom acquired using a 128-element convex transducer (2-5 MHz) with an active aperture of 8 elements. A Nios II processor was integrated into the FPGA to send and receive data from the model and transmit them to the host computer for off-line scan conversion and B-mode image generation. The results show that the proposed strategy is efficient for rapid prototyping of FPGA devices in ultrasound imaging applications. The overall FPGA resources utilization was less than 15%, indicating that other digital signal processing algorithms, such as interpolation, decimation, and scan conversion, can be implemented using this design methodology in both medical and non-destructive imaging applications.