서강대학교

초록/요약

As the integration technology advances, the various types of the portable ultrasound (US) imaging devices were proposed for point-of-care applications. However, in conventional portable US imaging devices, the application of the system is inevitably limited since it should have the dedicated connector and processing cores for using conventional US imaging probe and supporting the required signal and image processing in real-time, respectively. In this thesis, we present the hand-held smart US probe system, which includes analog and digital front-ends, mid-processor, interface, power supply and battery. 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 (FPGA) chip. The output data from the digital front-end are transferred to the commercial smart device via the USB 3.0 interface. The smart device performs the back-end processing and image display on a graphical user interface (GUI). The smart US probe system developed can provide the real-time B-mode images up to 30 Hz of frame rate with 7 W of power consumption. The weight and dimension of the developed system are 300 g and 170 x 43 x 38 mm3 in length, width, and height, respectively. To evaluate the performance of the proposed smart probe system, the phantom experiments were conducted.