An ultrasound system for tumor detection in soft tissues using low transient pulse

This work presents a method to detect the size and location of tumor in soft tissues using ultrasound. Quantitative ultrasound is utilized to allow an ultrasound signal to be sent from a transmitter to multiple receivers. This received signal is analyzed for echogenic and echolucent tumors to differentiate between the two along with non-tumor sample and also studied for the delay to determine the size/location of the tumor. The proposed system utilizes Low Transient Pulse (LTP) technique and is implemented using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technologies. In this co-design architecture, DSP carries out the analysis of received demodulated signal at a lower speed while FPGA runs at a higher one to generate LTP signal and demodulate bandpass ultrasonic signal. This work elaborates the implementation of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) receiver on FPGA for the received signal from an ultrasound detector. LTP is applied to the tumor samples through the transmitter and the received signal at an ultrasonic receiver is passed through QAM to obtain different maxima that are then further used to compute the location and the size of the tumor using DSP. This dual platform co-design demonstrates a good application of a FPGA/DSP platform for the LTP generation and received signal processing.