A new smart probe system for a tablet PC-based point-of-care ultrasound imaging system: Feasibility study

There is a growing interest in a hand-held ultrasound (US) system for a point-of-care diagnosis. In this paper, we present the hand-held smart US probe system, which includes analog and digital front-ends, mid-processor, and interface. In the analog front-end, 16 channels could be implemented using two eight-channel high-voltage pulsers and analog-to-digital converters (ADC). The following digital front-end was implemented using a single low-cost field programmable gate array chip (FPGA). The output data from the digital front-end are transferred to the commercial tablet PC via the USB 3.0 interface. The tablet PC performs the back-end processing and image display on a graphical user interface (GUI). The smart probe system developed can provide the real-time B-mode images up to 22 Hz of frame rate with 7 W of estimated maximum power consumption. The weight and dimension of the developed system are 73 g and 150 × 40 × 10 mm³ in length, width, and height, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the proposed smart probe system, the phantom and in vivo experiments were conducted.