The us4R™ is our latest, advanced ultrasound research platform for 2D and 3D ultrasound data acquisition and real time processing. The system is an all-in-one solution, composed of an ultrasound front-end, an embedded PC and a GPU cluster. Inspired by the architecture of our the now-obsolete USPlatform system, it exploits the latest electronics solutions to provide both improved analog signal conditioning (better signal-to-noise ratio, higher sampling rate, etc.) and greatly increased digital throughput for the raw RF data acquired. At the same time, the platform is considerably smaller and uses less power.
The us4R™ is scalable in the number of both TX and RX channels – featuring 128–1024 TX and 128–256 RX. For the very first time, the system can support a direct connection of up to 1024-element matrix-array probes, opening up new possibilities for real time 3D.
The ultrasound data acquisition subsystem is optimized and upgraded with the PCIe gen3 interface. For the most demanding applications, the system can support up to two PCIe 16-lanes data links to an external PC — resulting in an aggregated data bandwidth of 32GB/s (wire speed).
Direct access to raw RF data (i.e. channel data) and real-time software processing on the GPUs provides numerous possibilities for the research and evaluation of ultrasound algorithms and methods. The system is fully software-programmable — including transmit/receive schemes and processing functions. Standard software tools CUDA/OpenCL can be used to develop and integrate new algorithms into the Platform’s processing framework.
The us4R™ is ideally suited to R&D in medical imaging and non-destructive testing applications, and can work well as an educational tool and demonstration platform.
