Clustered Ultrasound Open Platform For Research

Ultrasound scanners have been widely used in the field of clinical diagnosis,but its application in scientific research is still limited.Specifically,the existing ultrasound scanners cannot meet some important requirements such as the controllability of ultrasonic transmit pulsing sequence,the data availability of each stage in the ultrasound processing process and the customization of ultrasound excitation waveform.Therefore,the open ultrasound platform designed for scientific research has emerged.It is generally recognized that such an ultrasound platform should have the following three core functions: customizable excitation waveforms,access to ultrasound channel data and realtime imaging.The study of new ultrasound technologies using an ultrasound open platform consume much less time and resources than the redesign of new ultrasound devices.Therefore,the development of ultrasound open platforms can greatly promote the research and development of medical ultrasound technologies.At the same time,it also has high practical value in the field of teaching because this kind of platforms can make users intuitively understand the physical meaning of the ultrasound algorithm.However,all the current ultrasound open platforms with three core functions are expensive and bulky.On the other hand,those more portable platforms do not have the complete three functions,either unable to obtain ultrasound channel data or unable to customize excitation waveforms.Moreover,the way of realizing customized excitation waveforms function on these platforms is not concise enough,which needs to convert the designed waveforms into digital code and then write them into configuration files.In addition,there is no relevant report on an ultrasound open platform with customizable excitation waveforms in China.In this thesis,a low-cost,highly portable clustered open platform for ultrasound research is studied and implemented.The platform has a complete set of three core functions,as well as the ability to fully control the ultrasound transmit and receive mode.Meanwhile,this thesis also implements a graphic design method for tri-state arbitrary waveform.A modular design method is adopted to realize a clustered platform,and each ultrasound module has an independent ultrasound system.Each module can be used as an ultrasound open platform with a low channel number,which makes the platform more flexible in practical scientific research.In the meantime,this modular implementation method reduces the difficulty of design and production as well as the cost of the platform.Furthermore,it improves the portability and maintainability of the platform.Finally,based on the developed ultrasound platform,the real-time processing of ultrasonic pulse Doppler algorithm is realized with the aid of GPU.Then,the coded excitation waveform is transmitted and the channel data is obtained through the platform,and the pulse Doppler algorithm based on coded excitation is realized on the MATLAB platform.