Hybrid Hardware and Software-Based Fully-Flexible Ultrasound Open Platform

This paper presents a real-time, fully flexible ultrasound open platform for medical imaging research, in which all the emission, capture and image formation parameters are defined by the user in a JSON configuration file. The hardware, FPGA code, software and the customized Linux distribution for the platform were developed at the Eldorado Research Institute, in partnership with the RBTU - Brazilian Network of Ultrasound Techniques. The motivation behind this work was the lack of flexibility in existing platforms to enable the evaluation of new signal processing and beamforming algorithms developed by the researchers of the RBTU.