Towards Wearable Ultrafast Ultrasound: A FPGA Solution

Wearable ultrasound has been extensively studied in the past several years. Multiple emerging applications including wearable cardiac and brain imaging have been demonstrated with wearable ultrasound. However, current wearable ultrasound still suffers from several key limitations. High image quality and fully integrated wearable ultrasound imaging hardware have not been achieved in combination. To date what has been constructed is either a limited channel count on a fully integrated wearable ultrasound system that has limited image quality and frame rate or a larger channel count wearable transducer connected to a cart-based ultrasound research platform. As a result, fully integrated wearable ultrafast ultrasound, which can be used as the foundation of wearable microvessel imaging, functional ultrasound or even brain computer interface, has not been demonstrated. The major roadblocks to enabling high image quality and frame rate on a fully integrated wearable ultrasound system are the computational cost and requirement for low power. To solve this problem, we propose a low power ultrafast beamformer solution using an FPGA with a highly efficient parallel IQ beamforming algorithm. A post-compounding beamforming rate of over 1000 frames per second was been achieved utilizing only 0.4 Watts power consumption. This result paves the way for fully integrated wearable ultrafast ultrasound imaging systems.