LightProbe: A fully-digital 64-channel ultrasound probe with high-bandwidth optical interface

A typical medical ultrasound-imaging system consists of a passive probe and a backend system containing the analog frontend and the digital processing unit, to which the probe connects over a coaxial cable harness. Digital processing is increasingly performed in software on powerful GPUs or multicore CPUs. These new system architectures have not only enabled new imaging modalities (Ultrafast Imaging, Vector Flow Estimation), but also reduced system cost, as ultrasound specific hardware is only used for the acquisition of the raw signals. The next step in this evolution are fully-digital ultrasound probes, which integrate the analog frontend and are equipped with a standard digital interface. This allows connecting the probe directly to a standard device, such as a workstation, tablet or mobile phone running an ultrasound software application. So far, this concept has been demonstrated for mobile applications, but is currently limited to a small number of frontend channels (∼16) due to the large digital bandwidth (>10 Gb/s) at the interface between the probe and the mobile device.