Requirements and Hardware Limitations of High-Frame-Rate 3-D Ultrasound Imaging Systems
Claudio Giangrossi; Alessandro Ramalli; Alessandro Dallai; Daniele Mazierli; Valentino Meacci; Enrico Boni; Piero Tortoli
The spread of high frame rate and 3-D imaging techniques has raised pressing requirements for ultrasound systems. In particular, the processing power and data transfer rate requirements may be so demanding to hinder the real-time (RT) implementation of such techniques. This paper first analyzes the general requirements involved in RT ultrasound systems. Then, it identifies the main bottlenecks in the receiving section of a specific RT scanner, the ULA-OP 256, which is one of the most powerful available open scanners and may therefore be assumed as a reference. This case study has evidenced that the &ldquo:star&rdquo: topology, used to digitally interconnect the system&rsquo:s boards, may easily saturate the data transfer bandwidth, thus impacting the achievable frame/volume rates in RT. The architecture of the digital scanner was exploited to tackle the bottlenecks by enabling a new &ldquo:ring&ldquo: communication topology. Experimental 2-D and 3-D high-frame-rate imaging tests were conducted to evaluate the frame rates achievable with both interconnection modalities. It is shown that the ring topology enables up to 4400 frames/s and 510 volumes/s, with mean increments of +230% (up to +620%) compared to the star topology.
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