Integrated control and signal processing software for next generation open ultrasound research platforms

Open ultrasound research systems such as the Ultrasound Array Research Platform (UARP) developed at the University of Leeds. UARP systems find application in ultrasound in diagnostic imaging, biomedical therapy, plus industrial Test and Measurement. The hardware is capable, but the range of end-application research which is made possible with UARP systems is currently limited by the inflexibility of its control interface and the current poor performance of the post-processing software.

Control software that enables unified flexible control over disparate heterogenous UARP systems is presented, enabling advanced techniques to be explored. The software is designed to be sufficiently extensible to work with planned future hardware. Tightly integrated with the control software is a Digital Signal Processing (DSP) framework for ultrasound with a specific focus on run-time performance. The proposed framework has parallel implementations in MATLAB and C++. A structured, tagged data format and associated software interface is also proposed here. Experiments into data saving methods are performed, and examples are provided of how this system can be fine-tuned to suit future application-specific requirements.

Accessible UARP control software enables users to customise the execution of ultrasound sequences, and automatic parameter calculation ensures system safety and reliability. The DSP framework balances performance with accessibility. The modular nature of the implementation removes many of the commonly encountered research barriers, and a copy-minimised multi-threaded design allows the C++ DSP framework to attain real-world performance which is 10-100 times higher than the MATLAB implementation at the expense of increased software complexity.

A study into the suitability of an industrial measurement UARP system in ultrasonic flow metering is has been conducted to demonstrate the integrated nature of the proposed software. The proposed flow measurement technique uses linear frequency-modulated coded excitations with spline interpolation up-sampling and cross-correlation based time-of-flight velocity estimation. Pilot plant measurements validate that the technique has an error rate of less than one percent.

Future impacts of the work include the advanced ultrasound sequences which are unlocked by the control software, and the DSP platform which already accelerates data processing for common ultrasound sequences and also provides a platform that will enable future single and multi-GPU processing hardware architectures.