Hardware Acceleration of Biomedical Microwave Techniques using High Level Synthesis

Microwave radiations have been proven to be effective in biomedical applications, including brain stroke monitoring. However, microwave algorithms in these applications are computationally expensive with compute-intensive parts that are termed “kernels”. To speed up the medical diagnosis, it is crucial to adopt new methodologies to accelerate the execution of these kernels by using specific hardware solutions. A recent trend in designing hardware accelerators is High Level Synthesis (HLS), which creates an implementation starting from a high-level description (C or C++) of an algorithm. In this paper, we first categorize the recurrent medical microwave techniques and kernels. Then, we propose efficient hardware accelerators for these kernels in programmable devices by using HLS. Several hardware optimization strategies are introduced and their impact on the overall performance is explored. We believe that the analysis of these kernels and their corresponding hardware acceleration techniques can be greatly beneficial to the biomedical microwave research community.