Power Efficient Ultrasound Imaging Diagnosis System Using Adaptive Data Prediction Scheme

An adaptive-data-prediction-based (ADPB) ultrasound receiver is developed to achieve a wide dynamic range (DR) and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) ultrasound imaging with no extra power penalty. To guarantee both high resolution and power efficiency, a digital linear predictor is introduced, which significantly enhances the resolution and eliminates the power hungry circuits in traditional receivers. With digital assisted signal processing, performance stress on analog modules including ADCs is relaxed, resulting in further reduced power consumption. To enable real-time digital signal processing, least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm is introduced. The proposed system was implemented on a FPGA-based hardware platform. The measurement results show that with a simple 10-bit ADC, it achieves 80-dB SNR, which can be usually accomplished by a state-of-art 16-bits ADC. More importantly, the elimination of TGC and the employment of low resolution ADC reduce the total power by 2-3 orders.