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在倾听皮肤下的听诊器一样，我们预见到手持医学成像会变得无处不在的时期。凝视皮肤下？使用手持成像设备。 手持成像不仅是方便的问题；已证明将成像装置移至患者（而不是关键患者到成像套件）已被证明可以改善临床结果。 此外，手持系统的可移植性可以使农村和发展中国家传统服务不足的人口可用。 如今，使用紧凑的电池操作的超声设备可以手持成像。 但是，现有的手持超声系统在患者内部产生低分辨率的二维视图，并且远远远远远远低于最先进的不容易出现的超声系统的图像质量。 这些较大的系统可以产生实时的3D超声图像，从而极大地提高了系统的易用性，并且已经被证明以提高诊断效率。 此外，直接3D图像采集可以实现新的诊断能力，这些功能很难或无法完成2D，例如测量体积血流。 但是，形成3D超声图像所需的计算能力比可比的2D成像要多5000倍。 由于它与人体皮肤紧密接触，因此超声扫描头必须在紧张的电量预算（类似于手机）内运行，以保持安全温度。 在此严格的电力预算中开发3D超声成像系统需要在信号处理和计算机架构技术中进行创新。本项目将开发一个针对3D手持超声波的新硬件体系结构，利用硬件和光束成形的共同设计，以及三维堆叠，大规模的平行式和流式的数据流程，并启用了一个较高的设备，以启用3维的算法。 该项目侧重于三个医学超声应用领域：（i）用于一般成像应用的图像质量增强功能，例如腹部成像； （ii）高级3D运动跟踪； （iii）心脏应用的高帧速率3D流跟踪。 拟议的研究计划重点是针对靶向心脏病和慢性阻塞性肺部疾病的特定新颖的诊断超声应用的硬件加速度，分别是美国的第一和第三主要死亡原因。 将使用FPGA原型来展示和评估项目创新，以重建使用现有超声探针捕获的物理幻象的图像。