Design And Realization Of The High-Speed Data Transmission Method For MRI Spectrometer

ObjectiveThis research, through the analysis of data transmission methods for magnetic resonance imaging spectrometer, combined with the current advanced embedded technology, applies the embedded Linux system based on the PowerPC architecture to the design of the magnetic resonance spectrometer. This paper designs and implements the network communication system of the embedded Linux based on PowerPC which is the high-speed data transmission platform between the control computer and the data acquisition and send module.Materials and MethodsThis system is an embedded network communication solution which is based on IBM / AMCC's PowerPC (Performance Optimized With Enhanced RISC PC, PowerPC for short) architecture and the embedded Linux operating system. The communication between the spectrometer and the control computer is implemented by TCP/IP protocol. The high-speed data exchange between this system and the data acquisition and send module is completed by the dual-port memory (Dual Port SRAM, DPRAM for short). The hardware system, based on the PowerPC architecture of Bubinga, mainly include the 266MHz, 32-bit PowerPC 405EP processor, 256MB SDRAM, 2MB NOR Flash, Samsung's 64MB NAND Flash, 16MB DPRAM, LXT972 Ethernet controller, 100Mbps Ethernet interface and RS232 interface. The software development environment is Red Hat Linux9.0 running in VMware virtual machine installed in a PC host with Windows Xp. The cross compile tool chains uses ELDK4.1 (Embedded Link Development Kit, ELDK for short) based on PowerPC designed by DENX Software Center in German. The software system mainly includes U-Boot-1.1.3 used to boot and load system, the embedded Linux-2.6 kernel, the DPRAM driver, the Linux root file system, the network communications server program.ResultsThis research designs the network communication systems with the embedded PowerPC processor and the embedded Linux operating system for magnetic resonance imaging spectrometer. After tested by a series of imaging and extreme conditions, this system has the data transmission speed of 100MB per second, the stable, reliable and secure transmission performance and the transmission real-time fully meeting the requirements of four channel imaging.ConclusionThis system has been successfully applied to the spectrometer of 0.5T magnetic resonance imaging system in Beijing Wandong Medical Equipment Co., Ltd. Long-term experiments indicate that this system is able to fully meet the requirements of magnetic resonance imaging in data transmission speed, real-time, stability and so on. Compared with similar system, this system greatly reduces the size of magnetic resonance spectrometer and substantially increases the signal-to-noise ratio of the magnetic resonance image.