Ultrasound based Real-Time, Guided Surgery for Treating Hydrocephalus: Prototype Implementation and Evaluation

This paper presents a real-time, surgery assistive, A-mode ultrasound imaging system to particularly increase the success rate of VP shunt surgery which is performed as a treatment towards Hydrocephalus (swelling of brain ventricles). The proposed system consists of custom-built ultrasound probe, the analog front-end, digital mid-end and back-end systems which are built to perform several functions such as echo amplification, conditioning, I-Q Demodulation, LVDS serial link interface, log compression etc. The board-level and FPGA-level hardware implementation of the proposed system with the above functionalities are explained and a prototype version of the same is shown. As a result, the developed system can provide real-time A-mode data of the retrieved ultrasound echoes. Experimental results of interfacing the prototype system with a custom-built 5MHz, 5mm sized single PZT crystal transducer probe is shown.