A field-programmable gate array based system for high frame rate laser Doppler blood flow imaging

This paper presents a general embedded processing system implemented in a field-programmable gate array providing high frame rate and high accuracy for a laser Doppler blood flow imaging system. The proposed system can achieve a basic frame rate of flow images at 1 frame/second for 256 x 256 images with 1024 fast Fourier transform (FFT) points used in the processing algorithm. Mixed fixed-floating point calculations are utilized to achieve high accuracy but with a reasonable resource usage. The implementation has a root mean square deviation of the relative difference in flow values below 0.1% when compared with a double-precision floating point implementation. The system can contain from one or more processing units to obtain the required frame rate and accuracy. The performance of the system is significantly higher than other methods reported to date. Furthermore, a dedicated field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board has been designed to test the proposed processing system. The board is linked with a laser line scanning system, which uses a 64 x 1 photodetector array. Test results with various operating parameters show that the performance of the new system is better, in terms of noise and imaging speed, than has been previously achieved.