UltraVision XR
The UltraVision development system is designed for the researcher or corporate developer that has a target product in mind. The XR is designed to be innocuous at the lowest cost. This UltraVision product has FDA 510k and can be the fastest and lowest-cost path to bring a new ultrasound product to the market.
Our advice for a developer is to purchase an Intel i7 laptop with thunderbolt 3 capability and equip it with our Application Programming Interface (API), and this system, where there are just 3 connections, a) 12 Volt DC power, b) A Thunderbolt 3 interface, and c) a Transducer connector. It will come with our Clinical Ultrasound Program for reference which will support the following modes and features: B-Mode, M-Mode, Pulse Wave Doppler, Color Flow Doppler, Compression Elastography, Photoacoustics, Harmonic Imaging, Patient Data Base, Cine (10 seconds), and Recording (continuous) facilities.
Everything is programmable
The API is written in C# with a C++ wrapper that allows the developers to write their own Graphical User Interface and control the operations and style of the system.
The development system differs from and is not promoted as a research platform. If the developer can specify the pulsers in phase, frequency, and delays for a custom algorithm it has been found quicker and easier for the UltraVision team to assist in implementing any custom algorithms from the extensive capabilities of the UltraVision system. The UltraVision’s transmit functions support +HV, -HV, Gnd, and Hi Impedance, on every channel in 512 delay profiles and 512 waveform profiles with a 6 or 4 nanosecond granularity that may be independently applied to each element in the transducer.
The UltraVision has eight beamformers that allow simultaneous acquisition of acoustic lines to speed and acquisition process. The raw, Radio Frequency (RF) data from each beamformer, or the RF data from each element’s channel is available to the developer. The digitization rate is either 40 or 60 MHz and the depth of the raw data is 14-bits for each individual channel or 20-bits for the beamformed data, or 16-bits for the enveloped Acoustic Line (AL) amplitude data.
The UltraVision is implemented as 64 14-bit 60-MHz analog to digital converters connected to a single large Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) with a 4-GByte DDR3 Memory and a PCIe interface. The PCIe interface in the development systems’ case is converted to a Thunderbolt 3 interface to ease access to the developer’s PC.
The PC is required to have at least a 7i7 Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) with a TB3 interface and operate in Windows10. In the clinical platform, the algorithms that produce the images of the various modes are shared between the three processors (CPU+GPU+FPGA). New algorithms may be developed from the RF or AL data in the CPU and GPU by the developer and when perfected the UltraVision engineers can instantiate the high-speed components of the algorithms into the FPGA for real-time operation.
A diagnostics window shows all voltages and temperatures, checks the functionality of every element in the transducer, and has features that display all channels in a 64-channel oscilloscope mode resolvable to one clock and one amplitude level.
Multiple transducers are available from curved linear arrays, linear arrays, and phased arrays.
The physical size of the research platform is 14 x 9.5 x 1.25 inches, and its weight is 3 lbs.