LightProbe: A 64-channel programmable ultrasound transducer head with an integrated front-end and a 26.4 Gb/s optical link

Medical ultrasound processing features two main components: A transducer head to generate the ultrasound wave and acquire the reflected signals and a processing system that will generate the final image. The connection between these two components is established using digital communication over a USB link for smaller mobile systems whereas large stationary systems operating with 4-16x more channels use analog signals over micro-coaxial cables to avoid link rates of 16-100 Gb/s. In this paper, we present LightProbe, a programmable ultrasound transducer head with an integrated 64-channel frontend and operating on an estimated 12 W worst-case power budget. LightProbe is the first transducer head equipped with a 26.4 Gb/s optical link. Moreover, it features a configurable FPGA that can be configured to pre-process the data on the transducer head and allows a flexible, inexpensive, light digital optical link that is immune to interference and can be tailored to fit a variety of devices from small mobile devices all the way to large stationary devices with high throughput requirements.