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

就像今天每个医学专业人员都在用听诊器在皮肤下面听一样，我们预见到有一天手持医学成像将变得同样无处不在；？在皮肤下窥视？使用手持成像设备。手持成像不仅是一个方便的问题；将成像设备转移到患者(而不是将危重患者转移到成像套件)已被证明可以改善临床结果。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服务。如今，通过紧凑型电池供电的超声波设备，手持成像成为可能。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图像，远远达不到最先进的非便携式超声系统所能提供的图像质量。这些更大的系统可以产生实时的3D超声图像，极大地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图像采集能够实现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超声图像所需的计算能力是同类2D成像的5000多倍。因为超声波扫描头与人体皮肤密切接触，所以它必须在严格的功率预算内运行(类似于手机)，以保持安全的温度。在如此紧张的功率预算下开发3D超声成像系统需要在信号处理和计算机架构技术方面的创新。该项目将开发一种新的手持3D超声硬件架构，利用硬件和波束形成算法、三维芯片堆叠、海量并行和数据流的共同设计，在手持设备中实现高分辨率3D超声成像。该项目专注于三个医学超声应用领域：(I)用于腹部成像等一般成像应用的图像质量增强；(Ii)先进的3D运动跟踪；以及(Iii)用于心脏应用的高帧速率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特定、新的诊断超声应用的硬件加速，心脏病和慢性阻塞性肺疾病分别是美国第一和第三大主要死亡原因。项目创新将使用一个用现有超声探头捕获的物理模型重建图像的现场可编程门阵列原型进行演示和评估。

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.