A new compact equipment for real-time acquisition and processing of medical ultrasound signals

Developing and testing novel ultrasound (US) investigation methods can be made difficult by commercial US echographs. Typically, most devices can export only the echographic images, providing either beamformed RF or demodulated echo-signal for acquisition by an external PC. Powerful but portable high-level commercial integrated circuits would be required in order to obtain access to the raw RF signal. First examples of such systems for ultrasound research are available (i.e. FEMMINA, ULA OP), although they are still far from size minimization. In this work we present a compact platform, consisting of a dedicated electronic board to be coupled with the US beamformer through an integrated analog front-end. Our platform was designed in order to simultaneously manage the RF flow data and to satisfy the following requirements: 1) ensuring that the full dynamic range of analog to digital converter (ADC) is completely exploited in order to maintain the ADC resolution capabilities through an appropriate amplifier, 2) denoising the RF signal input by a specific designed filter, 3) limited size, 4) low cost and 5) plug-and-play connection to the PC via a further USB port. Also, a suitable custom-developed graphical user interface was developed, enabling signal visualization and management of signal processing algorithms through an external PC. The output of an equivalent system, composed by commercially available stand-alone amplifier and ADC components, was assumed as the standard for comparing and grading the performances of our board. Analyzing the output of both systems in the frequency domain, we obtained matching spectra with a difference up to 0.21 dB. The so realized close synergy between hardware and software allows the acquisition and real-time processing of the echographic RF signals with fast data representation, allowing for the complete analysis of particular phenomena upon the study of the interaction between US signals and the investigated target for specific clinical diagnosis (i.e. osteoporosis in the bone tissue, tissue typing applications).