Portable Low Cost Ultrasound Imaging System
ABSTRACT
Yrd. Doç. Dr.
Göksen Göksenin
Yaralıoğlu
2014 Grants Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Ultrasonic imaging systems are being widely used. Medical professionals such as doctors and sonographers use a handheld
probe that is directly placed on to a patient to image different body parts. Various probes are used to image different body
parts and internal organs. Probes usually employ a transducer array. Typically these transducer arrays have 64, 96 or
128 elements. While in use, each element of the transducer is driven by a dedicated beam former electronics in transmit.
Similarly reflected acoustic echoes are collected again by a dedicated receive beam former electronics. By using beam
formers 2D and 3D images are obtained without mechanical scanning. However due to high channel count and large amount
of data that needs to be processed, ultrasonic imaging systems are quite expensive. A typical system costs somewhere
between $100K to $250K. Recently low cost laptop computer based ultrasound systems have been developed to facilitate the
common use of ultrasound devices. The cost reduction is achieved by reducing the channel count. The aim was to increase
the use of ultrasound systems by doctors. However, even these systems are quite expensive,