Portable, low-cost medical ultrasound device prototype

The first generation prototype of a portable, low-cost medical ultrasound device is described along with experimental results. The prototype system consists of a fully sampled 2D transducer array, sixteen custom receive circuitry chips multiplexed into two bandpass filter channels, and an onboard programmable logic device. A PC fitted with a commercially available data acquisition card is used for data collection and analysis. Beamforming is performed using the direct-sampled in-phase/quadrature method. Pulse-echo images obtained with the prototype are presented and future work is discussed.