Computing architecture for the portable four-dimensional ultrasound diagnostic imaging system

This paper describes the analog front end module and the computing architecture components of a fully digital realtime 3D ultrasound system. The computing architecture is designed to allow for an efficient implementation of a 3D adaptive beamformer that has the capability to improve the angular image resolution of a planar array by approximately four times. The complex 3D beamforming structure is decomposed into two steps of line array beamformers and this kind of decomposition process for the 3D beamformer allows for its efficient implementation into the highly parallelized multiprocessor based computing architecture for real time 3D ultrasound imaging applications providing 20 volumes per second. The main objective of this paper is to describe the details of the system requirements and design consideration for the computing architecture and provide the experimental results showing that the proposed implementation can achieve the targeted frame rate.