Founded in 1999, the UltraVision Corporation was driven by a vision that a medical ultrasonic scanner could be built in a single large Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). By the year 2000 the ultrasound industry had gathered sufficient size for the semiconductor industry to make specific integrated circuits to be used as pulsers and receivers in ultrasound scanners. The receivers were fully-integrated, 8-Channel Ultrasound Analog Front End, (AFE) featured small size, image uniformity, and cost benefits so that they became ubiquitous. The pulsers however have taken almost another 20 years to surpass the functionality of discrete transistors but were smaller and lower cost than the discrete solutions.
It was envisioned that some of these integrated circuits and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) connected to a personal computer could make an ultrasound scanner. In 2000 this was visionary and it took another seven years before the individual FPGAs had sufficient capabilities to provide everything a scanner needed. Once this capability was passed the image and modes of ultrasound could be processed in software. Well firmware acutally, but the FPGA could process massively parallel data from multi-element transducers with sub-nanosecond accuracy, and further, with a carefull design, the clocks for the processing could be accurate to fempto-seconds and jitter in processed image like color flow would disappear.
The FPGA could also connect directly to the personal computers memory via a standard called PCIe, (peripheral component interconnect express) which is the interface standard for connecting high-speed components and every desktop PC motherboard has a number of PCIe slots for graphic cards or memory. Thus the ultrasonic scanner was now integrated into the PC as a desk top. This is not an ideal location as the scanner need to be in an electrically quiet environment as in the far field it is measuring hundredths of a microvolts. Then came Thunderbolt first in the Apple laptops and this converted the PCIe socket into a thin cable that would allow the scanner to be physically separated from the PC but it was so fast the PC would think any memory in the scanner was part of its memory and it would address it as such. Eventually many Laptop manufacturers put Thunderbolt connections in their premium systems. Then thunderbolt was found in a few Tablets. Unfortunately these tables did not have the durability for a medical device until September of 2021 when Microsoft put a thunderbolt interface on its high end Tablet in the Surface Pro 8 series.
Putting the ultrasound scanner effectively in an Intel PC equiped with Windows allows programmers who were schooled in Windows tools like Visual Studio to program imaging algorithms in to scanners. A third tool in the PC designed for gaming the Graphics Processing Unit or GPU became an important tool for ultrasound. The GPU consisted of multiple cores that could process parts of the image simultaneously.
We have developed expertise in photoacoustic, static elastography and shear wave imaging, as well as all the modes and methods of attaining excellent B-mode and Color Flow imaging.
Our systems use a standard PC with a Thunderbolt interface so we have developed a comprehensive Graphical User Interface and a Applications Programable interface that our customers are free to develop their own interfaces. In September 2021, Microsoft released a Surface tablet with an Intel I7 processor and a Thunderbolt interface that has withstood our testing. This Microsoft release will allow us to develop and market our own products to the end user in 2022. We seek experts in each of the multiple specialties of ultrasound to participate with us to bring these Point of Care Ultrasound systems to the market.
