P2D-6 Ultrasound Color Doppler Imaging on a Fully Programmable Architecture

Ultrasound color Doppler imaging is widely used for real-time evaluation of blood flow in a user-specified region of interest. However, it is computationally expensive and burdensome for low-end ultrasound machines. In this paper, we have investigated the feasibility of performing color Doppler processing on a low-cost programmable architecture consisting of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) (e.g., Cyclone II, Altera, San Jose, CA) and a digital signal processor (DSP) (e.g., TMS320C64x, Texas Instruments, Dallas, TX). From the feasibility study, we have found that only 63.8% and 49.2% of the resources in the FPGA and DSP, respectively, are utilized to support all the digital processing (i.e., front-end and back-end) for color Doppler imaging with a typical system configuration for portable ultrasound machines. These results indicate that a low-cost programmable architecture can meet the requirements of front-end and back-end processing in ultrasound color Doppler imaging