Ultrasound engineering, made in the USA since 1999

A scanner in a single FPGA

Founded in 1999, UltraVision was driven by a vision that a medical ultrasonic scanner could be built in a single large field-programmable gate array connected to a personal computer. By 2000 the ultrasound industry was large enough for the semiconductor industry to make dedicated pulser and receiver circuits; it took another seven years before FPGAs could provide everything a scanner needed. Once they could, the image and the modes of ultrasound could be processed in firmware with sub-nanosecond accuracy, and jitter in processed images like colour flow disappeared.

PCIe then let the FPGA connect directly to the PC's memory, Thunderbolt put that connection on a thin cable so the scanner could sit in an electrically quiet environment away from the PC, and the gaming GPU became a tool for processing parts of the image in parallel. Putting the scanner effectively inside a Windows PC lets programmers schooled in tools like Visual Studio write imaging algorithms directly into scanners.

Along the way we developed expertise in photoacoustics, compression and ARFI elastography, diverging-wave imaging and GPU pixel beamforming, as well as all the modes and methods of attaining excellent B-mode and colour flow imaging. We seek experts in each of the specialties of ultrasound to participate with us in bringing point-of-care ultrasound to market.