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

就像今天每个医学专业人员都用听诊器在皮肤下听一样，我们预见到手持医学成像将变得无处不在;？在皮肤下窥视使用手持成像设备。 手持式成像不仅是一个方便的问题;将成像设备移动到患者（而不是将危重患者移动到成像室）已被证明可以改善临床结果。 此外，手持系统的便携性可以使农村和发展中国家传统上得不到充分服务的人口获得先进的成像。 今天，手持成像是可能的紧凑，电池供电的超声设备。 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，并且远远达不到现有技术的非便携式超声系统中可能的图像质量。 这些更大的系统可以生成实时3D超声图像，大大提高了系统的易用性，并已被证明可以提高诊断效率。 此外，直接3D图像采集实现了2D难以或不可能实现的新诊断功能，例如测量体积血流。 然而，形成3D超声图像需要比可比的2D成像多5000倍的计算能力。 由于它与人体皮肤密切接触，超声扫描头必须在严格的功率预算（类似于手机）内运行，以保持安全温度。 在这种紧张的功耗预算下开发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。该项目将开发一种新的3D手持超声硬件架构，利用硬件和波束形成算法的协同设计，三维芯片堆叠，大规模并行和流式数据流，以实现手持设备中的高分辨率3D超声成像。 该项目侧重于三个医疗超声应用领域：（i）用于一般成像应用（如腹部成像）的图像质量增强;（ii）高级3D运动跟踪;以及（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疾病的诊断超声的特定，新颖应用的硬件加速，这两种疾病分别是美国第一和第三大死亡原因。 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幻影图像。

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.