Implementation of non standard methods with the Ultrasound Advanced Open Platform (ULA-OP)

The Ultrasound Advanced Open Platform (ULA-OP) was recently developed with the specific goal of enabling the implementation of non standard working modalities, either in real-time or off-line, as made possible by the access to raw echo-data at each point of the receiver chain. Three case studies, demonstrating the fulfillment of initial specifications, are reported here. They consist in the implementation of: 1) a high frame rate (HFR) imaging approach producing images with uniform resolution; 2) an original real-time vector Doppler technique based on two US beams concurrently controlled by the on board DSP; 3) the simultaneous measurement of both the stimulus (wall shear stress increase) and the effect (diameter enlargement) in Flow Mediated Dilation (FMD) studies. In each of the aforementioned applications, the hardware & software resources of ULA-OP are differently exploited, showing that the system is a nice tool to implement non standard US modalities.