Real-Time Ultrasound Open Platform with an Extendable Number of Channels

Ultrasound open platforms are ideal instruments to experiment innovative modalities in transmission and reception. So far, the high number of channels, involved in applications based on 2-D arrays, has been managed through complex combinations of scanners and personal computers, at the expense of ease of use, portability, and real-time performance. This work presents a new flexible architecture, based on the full (hardware and software) synchronization of multiple ULA-OP 256 scanners, in a Master-Slave architecture, and controlled by a single computer. For the hardware synchronization, a Master scanner provides two digital signals (clock and transmission start) to the Slave scanners, while the software synchronization is managed by two purposely developed MATLAB classes that allow the user to interface the scanners as a single system. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the architecture, a 512-channel prototype, composed of two ULA-OP 256 connected to a host PC and to a sparse array, was implemented and tested through applications that demonstrate the high real-time processing power.