A high-resolution ultrafast beamformer for surgical microtransducers

In recent years, ultrasound imaging has become an indispensable tool for intra-surgical guidance. Most neuro and spine surgeries, however, are now trending towards minimally invasive approaches. In these surgeries, the entire surgery is performed using endoscopic instruments inserted into a small surgical pathway. Consequently, surgical imaging technologies such as ultrasound, must also adapt to be compatible with these new approaches where they are confined to narrow surgical corridors. We have recently developed a novel, high-resolution, endoscopic ultrasound system specifically for guiding these minimally invasive surgeries. The entire system including the probe, the electronics, and software has been designed and fabricated from the ground up. This imaging platform has recently been approved for a preliminary patient imaging study has already produced promising, first-of-its kind data during brain tumour resection and spinal cord surgeries. This presentation will discuss the challenges associated with developing high frequency (30 MHz) miniaturized micro-arrays and the associated electronic beamformer. The beamformer we have developed is based on parallelized FPGAs, can process data at rates higher than 10Tb/s, and generate frame-rates higher than 1kHz. The beamforming architecture incorporates a hybrid imaging mode that interleaves ultrafast imaging for Doppler, and line-by-line focusing for B-Mode. The Doppler mode is overlayed on the BMode image in real-time.