[Regular Paper] Implementation of an Ultrasound Platform for Proposed Photoacoustic Image Reconstruction Algorithm

Abstract

Photoacoustic tomography is a quickly growing imaging method that can provide images of high spatial resolution and high contrast at a limited depths. Medical photoacoustic processing characteristics two main components: A transducer is required to transmit laser pulses and acquire the reflected ultrasound signals and a back-end processing system that will generate the final reconstructed image. In this paper, we introduce an implementation of the receive part of proposed embedded system and briefly discuss reconstruction algorithms which are used in medical imaging systems. Furthermore, an intellectual property core (IP-core), which can be controlled and configured by a user application on Zynq-7000 System-On-Chip (SoC) via AXI-Lite Interface, that can receive multichannel digitized raw signals from Analog-Front-End (AFE) device via Low Voltage Differential Signal (LVDS), is proposed for photoacoustic imaging systems. Besides, block diagram of the system, the hardware design flow and the proposed IP-core are fully described in this paper. In order to effortlessly test and evaluate a wide variety of ultrasonic signal processing applications, 16 channel system is implemented and demonstrated by using TI AFE5816 Evaluation module (EVM) based on AFE5816 device and Xilinx ZC702 Evaluation Kit based on Zynq-7000 SoC. Apart from working on hardware, we review and commented on the proposed 3-Dimensional photoacoustic image reconstruction algorithm.