FPGA-Based Embedded Signal Processing for 3-D Ultrasound Computer Tomography

A three-dimensional ultrasound computer tomography (3-D USCT) system for early breast cancer diagnosis is currently being developed at Institute for Data Processing and Electronics (IPE) at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany. A field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based data acquisition (DAQ) system is used to acquire the measurement data. Over 3.5 million data sets are recorded for each breast, resulting in 20 GB of raw data. The data is subsequently transferred to a PC for time-consuming image reconstruction, which is in the order of days. A promising approach in reducing reconstruction time is mapping further computation to the FPGAs in the DAQ system. This paper covers the investigation of FPGA-based processing for a set of signal processing algorithms. In the best suited approach, processing time per data set is approximately 50 μs, occupying less than 30% of device resources.