A FPGA/DSP based ultrasound system for tumor detection

This work presents a method of detection of size and location of tumor using ultrasound transmission. The system utilizes Quantitative Ultrasound (QUS) which means sending an ultrasound signal from a transmitter and receiving it at multiple receivers. This received signal is analyzed for echogenic as well as echolucent tumors to differentiate between the two along with non-tumorous sample and also for delay, signal distortion to determine the size/location of the tumor. This analysis is further implemented using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Digital Signal Processor (DSP) technologies. The proposed detection system utilizes Low Transient Pulse (LTP) technique. In this co-design architecture, the DSP carries out analysis of received demodulated signal at a lower speed while the FPGA runs at 62.5MHz for the generation of LTP signal and to demodulate bandpass ultrasonic signal sampled at 1MHz which interrupts DSP at every 1µS. This work elaborates the implementation of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) receiver on FPGA for received signal from ultrasound detector. LTP is applied to the tumor samples through the transmitter and the received signal at ultrasonic receiver is passed through QAM to get different maxima (peaks) which are then further used for calculation of the location and subsequently, the size of the tumor using DSP. This dual platform co-design demonstrates application of a FPGA/DSP platform for the generation of low transient pulse as well as processing of the received signal