Abstract
Open platform (OP) ultrasound systems are aimed primarily at the research community. They have been at the forefront of the development of synthetic aperture, plane wave, shear wave elastography, and vector flow imaging. Such platforms are driven by a need for broad flexibility of parameters that are normally preset or fixed within clinical scanners. OP ultrasound scanners are defined to have three key features including customization of the transmit waveform, access to the prebeamformed receive data, and the ability to implement real-time imaging. In this paper, a formative discussion is given on the development of OPs from both the research community and the commercial sector. Both software- and hardware-based architectures are considered, and their specifications are compared in terms of resources and programmability. Software-based platforms capable of real-time beamforming generally make use of scalable graphics processing unit architectures, whereas a common feature of hardware-based platforms is the use of field-programmable gate array and digital signal processor devices to provide additional on-board processing capacity. OPs with extended number of channels (>256) are also discussed in relation to their role in supporting 3-D imaging technique development. With the increasing maturity of OP ultrasound scanners, the pace of advancement in ultrasound imaging algorithms is poised to be accelerated.
Highlights
U LTRASOUND imaging has enjoyed tremendous success as a real-time imaging modality for bedside diagnostics [1]
We present a formative discussion on the current state of the art in open platform (OP) ultrasound scanner design and emerging development trends
This drawback was remedied by the ultrasound advanced OP (ULA-OP) system developed by Tortoli et al [18], [52], which is a compact system with the capability of processing 64 channel data in real-time for a 192-element probe
Summary
U LTRASOUND imaging has enjoyed tremendous success as a real-time imaging modality for bedside diagnostics [1]. Thanks to these engineering advances, clinical ultrasound scanners are generally compact enough to fit within a rollable trolley or even a portable tablet device [7], [8]. In response to this need, a few ultrasound scanners with addon research interfaces have been developed by clinical system manufacturers in the early 2000s [12]–[15] These platforms have granted researchers with access to the system’s radio frequency (RF) data acquired after delay-and-sum beamforming, and in turn, researchers may use these raw data sets to test new signal processing algorithms.
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