Ultrasound over Ethernet: Pathway to Enormous Channel Count Ultrasound System

Ultrafast ultrasound serves as the foundation for many advanced imaging methods such as ultrafast power Doppler, ultrasound localization microscopy, and functional ultrasound. Recent efforts have aimed at upgrading these techniques to 3D and even 4D imaging. However, the high cost of systems with enormous channel count has hindered the widespread adoption of 3D ultrafast ultrasound with uncompromised volume rates. A key bottleneck is the limited scalability of current ultrasound research platforms. To solve this problem, we propose transferring ultrasound data over Ethernet using a lightweight remote FPGA direct memory access (RFDMA) protocol. This protocol facilitates the direct transfer of ultrafast ultrasound data between FPGAs over Ethernet without CPU intervention, achieving a data transfer rate of 1.1 GB/s via a low-cost commercial off-the-shelf 10Gb Ethernet switch.