SHF: Medium: Collaborative Research: Advanced Architectures for Hand-held 3D Ultrasound

SHF：媒介：协作研究：手持式 3D 超声的先进架构

• 批准号: 1406739
• 负责人: Thomas Wenisch
• 金额: $ 59.92万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-06-01 至 2019-05-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1406739&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: SHF; Medium; Collaborative; Research; Advanced

Much as every medical professional listens beneath the skin with a stethoscope today, we foresee a time when hand-held medical imaging will become as ubiquitous; ?peering under the skin? using a hand-held imaging device. Hand-held imaging is not only a matter of convenience; moving the imaging device to the patient (rather than a critical patient to an imaging suite) has been shown to improve clinical outcomes. Moreover, the portability of hand-held systems can make advanced imaging available to traditionally underserved populations in the rural and developing world. Today, hand-held imaging is possible with compact, battery-operated ultrasound devices. However, existing hand-held ultrasound systems produce a low-resolution two-dimensional view within the patient, and fall far short of the image quality possible in state-of-the-art non-portable ultrasound systems. These larger systems can produce real-time 3D ultrasound images, drastically improving system ease of use, and have already been demonstrated to improve diagnostic efficiency. Moreover, direct 3D image acquisition enables new diagnostic capabilities that are difficult or impossible to accomplish with 2D, such as measuring volumetric blood flow. However, forming 3D ultrasound images requires over 5000 times more computing horsepower than comparable 2D imaging. Because it is in close contact with human skin, an ultrasound scan head must operate within a tight power budget (similar to that of a cell phone) to maintain safe temperatures. Developing a 3D ultrasound imaging system within this tight power budget requires innovation both in signal processing and computer architecture techniques.This project will develop a new hardware architecture for 3D hand-held ultrasound that leverages co-design of hardware and beamforming algorithms, three-dimensional die stacking, massive parallelism, and streaming data flow, to enable high-resolution 3D ultrasound imaging in a hand-held device. The project focuses on three medical ultrasound applications areas: (i) image quality enhancements for general imaging applications, such as abdominal imaging; (ii) advanced 3D motion tracking; and (iii) high-frame-rate 3D flow tracking for cardiac applications. The proposed research program focuses on hardware acceleration for specific, novel applications of diagnostic ultrasound targeting heart disease and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, respectively the 1st and 3rd leading causes of death in the United States. Project innovations will be demonstrated and evaluated using an FPGA prototype to reconstruct images of physical phantoms captured with existing ultrasound probes.

就像今天每个医疗专业人员都用听诊器聆听皮肤下的声音一样，我们预见到手持式医学成像将变得无处不在； ？窥视皮下？使用手持式成像设备。 手持成像不仅方便，而且方便。事实证明，将成像设备转移到患者身上（而不是将危重患者转移到成像室）可以改善临床结果。 此外，手持系统的便携性可以为农村和发展中国家传统上服务不足的人群提供先进的成像技术。 如今，手持式成像可以通过紧凑的电池供电超声设备实现。 然而，现有的手持式超声系统在患者体内产生低分辨率的二维视图，并且远远低于最先进的非便携式超声系统中可能的图像质量。 这些较大的系统可以生成实时 3D 超声图像，极大地提高了系统的易用性，并且已经被证明可以提高诊断效率。 此外，直接 3D 图像采集可实现 2D 难以或不可能实现的新诊断功能，例如测量体积血流量。 然而，形成 3D 超声图像需要比同类 2D 成像多 5000 倍的计算能力。 由于超声波扫描头与人体皮肤紧密接触，因此必须在严格的功率预算（类似于手机的功率预算）内运行，以保持安全温度。 在如此紧张的功耗预算内开发 3D 超声成像系统需要在信号处理和计算机架构技术方面进行创新。该项目将为 3D 手持式超声开发一种新的硬件架构，该架构利用硬件和波束成形算法的协同设计、三维芯片堆叠、大规模并行性和流数据流，以在手持设备中实现高分辨率 3D 超声成像。 该项目重点关注三个医学超声应用领域：(i) 一般成像应用的图像质量增强，例如腹部成像； (ii) 先进的 3D 运动跟踪； (iii) 用于心脏应用的高帧率 3D 血流跟踪。 拟议的研究计划侧重于针对心脏病和慢性阻塞性肺病（分别是美国第一和第三大死亡原因）的超声诊断的特定新颖应用的硬件加速。 项目创新将使用 FPGA 原型进行演示和评估，以重建现有超声探头捕获的物理体模的图像。